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This report was written for the University of Otago in the paper CHEM306 over a two week long lab cycle.

Quality assurance in any scientific forum is important to ensure an analysis is reliable, reproducible, and meaningful. But the quality assurance of any workload is never without some amount of uncertainty, and so in order to maintain transparency and reliability, we not only analyze the results, but we analyze the methodology, equipment, and technique that dictates the potential error of an experiment. This experiment aims to demonstrate quality assurance through a standard hydrochloric acid solution of 0.1 moles per litre was used, and through titration of a sodium calcium solution, we can attempt to calculate the hydrochloric acid concentration after multiple experimental steps and determine the certainty of the method and appreciate the influence error has on a scientific analysis.

Methodology

To perform this experiment required a standard hydrochloric acid solution made via the preparation of constant-boiling-point hydrochloric acid. For the titration, utilize flasks with approximate 0.2 sodium carbonate each that is dissolved in a water solution alongside an indicator solution. Titrate the hydrochloric acid solution into each flask until the orange colour shifts to a faint pink recording readings as you progress.

Results

In the results of this experiment, there are two key elements in the experimental process which is the error of the equipment used. Experimentally, the flasks, weighing mechanism, and burette make up the values on Figure 3, the total uncertainty for these is approximately 0.1414, and 0.0002 (4dp).
Experimentally the amount of Na2CO3 in the flasks is shown on Figure 2 in the added column on average being about 0.2153g. Recordings of the ml of HCl added to the sodium carbonate solution can be found of Figure 1 with amounts added being approximate 32.24ml added on average. Based on the amount added up to the acid/base equivalence point, it was mathematically determined with consideration of error that the amount of acid calculated after the titration, differed from the original concentration of the HCl by a final estimate margin of 0.0001 mol L-1 (± 0.1692%) on average as shown on figure 4. This compared to the original 0.1 mol L-1 solution along outlines the significance of uncertainty and error as well as the complications that come with quality assurance.

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Bibliography

Harris, D.C. Quantitative Chemical Analysis 7th Edition W.H. Freeman and Co., Freeman and Co., New York. ISBN: 0-7167-7041-5
University of Otago: Chemistry Department (2022). A Practical Course in Forensic Analytical Chemistry. 2022 Edition ed. University of Otago.
Vogel A. Vogel’s textbook of quantitative chemical analysis. Harlow, England : Prentice Hall, 2000, ISBN: 0-5822-2628-7

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This report was written for the University of Otago in the paper CHEM306 over a two week long lab cycle.

Counterfeit foods are serious business politically, economically, and generally. Honey is a rich sugar and protein substance which is made differently across different countries through different methods. Although honey that is made to masquerade honey through addition of sugar adulterants do not follow these guidelines each honey is made by, manipulating its contents for cheaper alternatives, and passing them off as an authentic product Wiley Research, n.d. Because of this however, analyses can be used to differentiate between a legitimate and illegitimate honey product. Although notably the reason why this is important to test for, is counterfeit food goods can come with potentially dangerous impacts on the consumer, as honey is known to have many positive effects medically and nutritionally. Fraud foods therefore is subject to leading its consumers astray, potentially even being toxic to them Fakhlaei et al., 2020.
The adulteration of C3 sugars, which are derived from the nectar bees obtain from plants will differ from the adulteration of other sugars such as C4 sugars derived from cane sugar as well as high fructose corn syrup. This information is critical to routine determination of illegitimate goods and is what this experiment aims to analyze a selection of six different honey samples and observe through a pass or fail test between the adulteration of these sugars compared to reference whole honey standards. The honey analysis involves especially isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) to detect foreign sugars through carbon isotopes which is a commonly practiced testing method today Walker et al., 2022.

Methodology

Using a selection of different honey products, follow procedures outlined by the University of Otago Lab Manual for Forensic Chemistry of 2022. Each product was weighed and dissolved in water with heating, thereafter, centrifuged five times to clean and keep the floc. The left-over pellet was then dried and an isotope ratio analysis on the compound was done to derive adulteration data on each honey sample.

Results

The results show a test of adulteration using a standard reference of whole honey products against the samples. Calculations on the table also used a punitive value for high fructose corn syrup to select for the C4 sugars and calculate for evidence of adulteration therefore indicating for substituent sugars being used in its composition. Any values that are only 7% approximately are indicative of adulteration in the samples, out of the tested samples only one honey, the Hollands Protein 604 failed the test showing evidence for honey adulteration.
In the context of possibility calculative uncertainty, total uncertainty for each honey sample were also deduced and can be applied in the formula: % Honey Adulteration ± Total Uncertainty. Although the status of honey passing or failing the test with the total uncertainty included does not change.

Calculation Working

Calculate the adulteration of 13C VPDB (Easy Spread) Protein 601 = ((-25.858 - -25.85)/(-25.828-(-9.7)))*100 = -0.105406746
and the adulteration of Carbon% = ((33.698 - -34.65)/(33.698-(-9.7)))*100 = -2.202290428
Standard Error of 13C VPDB = 0.2921/sqrt(15) = 0.07542
Standard Error of 13C Carbon = 3.8107/sqrt(15) = 0.9839
To calculate uncertainty, we use the equation y*(sqrt(((utop/top)^2)+((ubottom/bottom)^2)))
y = -0.1054/100 = 0.001054 (This is drawing from the adulteration of 13C VPDB
utop = 0.07542/0.9839 = 0.9868
top = 33.698 - -25.828 = 59.53 (Difference between carbon % and 13C VPDB)
ubottom = SE of VPDB = 0.07542
bottom = -25.828 (13C VPDB)
When put all together we have:
0.001054*(sqrt(((0.9868/59.53)^2)+((0.07542/-25.828)^2))) = 1.77431E-05.
We want to revert this by times 100. To get the total uncertainty
1.77431E-05 * 100 = 0.001774309

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Bibliography

Fakhlaei, R., Selamat, J., Khatib, A., Razis, A.F.A., Sukor, R., Ahmad, S. and Babadi, A.A. (2020). The Toxic Impact of Honey Adulteration: A Review. Foods, 9(11), p.1538. doi:10.3390/foods9111538.
University of Otago: Chemistry Department (2022). A Practical Course in Forensic Analytical Chemistry. 2022 Edition ed. University of Otago.
Walker, M.J., Cowen, S., Gray, K., Hancock, P. and Burns, D.T. (2022). Honey authenticity: the opacity of analytical reports - part 1 defining the problem. npj Science of Food, 6(1). doi:10.1038/s41538-022-00126-6.
Wiley Research (n.d.). Honey Authenticity. [online] secure.wiley.com. Available at: https://secure.wiley.com/HoneyAuthenticity [Accessed 12 Aug. 2022].

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This report was written for the University of Otago in the paper CHEM306 over a two week long lab cycle.

This report analyses the unknown substance X0766 by deduction from its empirical formula and determining the structure via NMR and IR spectroscopy.

To elucidate the structure of X0766 we need an empirical formula to base it off, we have been already provided with the percentages of elements in the substances as well as their parent ion molar mass, which were used to calculate the approximate empirical formulas of both substances which helps to begin putting together the substance structure. Using this, generally, carbons are bonded together with up to three hydrogens on the end carbons and 2 hydrogens on carbons along the chain. For X0766, this would mean we can expect 18 hydrogens for 8 carbons, but there are only 8 hydrogens, this can indicate for carbon-to-carbon double bond structures reduce the number of bonding hydrogens, possible ring structures of carbon bonds looping, and additional structural groups along the carbon chain. This also narrows the structure down to a benzene ring, consisting of six carbons but this leaves out the two other carbon groups as well as 4 hydrogens which are a part of some other structure group attached to the chain. Many of the methodologies to elucidate the structure was derived from the University of Otago: Chemistry Department 2022) among other useful chemical elucidation resources.

X0766 was then run through both 1H, 13C NMR spectra and IR spectra to visualise information about the structures. X0766 has two key NMR spectra for Carbons and Hydrogens.

Gmol C = 12 | Gmol O = 16 | Gmol H = 1
70.6/12 = 5.883 | 5.883/1.46875 = 4 | 4*12 = 48
5.9/1 = 5.9 | 5.9/1.46875 = 4 | 4*1 = 4 | 4 * 1 = 4
23.5/16 = 1.46875 | 1.46875/1.46875 = 1 | 1*16 = 16
Total = 48+4+16 = 68 | 68*2 = 136 which is approximately equal to parent ion value of X0766.
X0766 Formula: C8H8O2

13C NMR Notes for X0766

The carbon 13 NMR spectrum (Figure 4) has 7 major peaks at positions 173.95, 141.55, 131.79, 133.14, 126.01, 128.50, and 22.29, all these peaks were analysed using Mestrenova. We should have 8 peaks so this means that one of these peaks may be split by obfuscating another similar structure in the peaks. The peak however at position 77.2 is the chloroform solvent peak and isn’t relevant to the examined unknown substance. Most of the methodologies and ideas used to interpret the 13C NMR data come from Clark (2014a) as well as the lab manual provided by the University of Otago: Chemistry Department (2022)

To start we can infer the substance we are working with is an aromatic compound due to the high abundance of peaks in the 100 to 160ppm range, which is a pattern often found with aromatic compounds.

Secondly, with the farthest peak at 173.95, peaks at this ppm range are consistent with carboxylic acid groups and esters. In addition to this, the earliest peak at 22.29 informs of another important structure, a primary alkyl group or methyl function group. Based on the allotment of carbon and hydrogen atoms we must elucidate this structure; all hydrogens and carbons would be inadequately accounted for had the structure had an ester functional group and therefore it is most probably a carboxylic acid group that accompanies the methyl group.

Lastly, in the assignment of carbons due to the high frequency of C=C and C-C groups, determining their exact assignment is difficult. Although the assignment for the functional groups is evident as they have the only unique environmental structures.

1H NMR Notes for X0766

With the 1H NMR (Figure 3), each peak was integrated, and the reference solvent peak was identified at 7.26ppm. Out of all the peaks, we found a double doublet at 8.09ppm, a multiplicity peak at 7.28ppm, a triplet doublet at 7.44 ppm, and one really large peak around 2.68ppm. All information here is analysed through MestreNova and interpretation information is largely derived from a helpful 1H NMR guide by Clark (2014b) alongside data from the lab manual provided by the University of Otago: Chemistry Department (2022)

Starting with the large peak at 2.68ppm, it is a methyl group as the peak is indicatively early in the spectra and contains a total of three hydrogen atoms in the group. One thing that is worth noting though, is based on the carbon 13 NMR, it was determined there is a carboxylic acid group on the substance, although the peak for this would be very small near to 12ppm which the spectra we obtained didn’t visualize possibly due to technological limitations, error, or a bad NMR generation.

Following this, we needed to determine the orientation of the methyl group from the carboxylic acid group on the substance. We knew though, that because there were two cases of symmetry on the NMR (two multiplicity detections) there was no way it could be in the para position. Using chemical shift of substituted benzene calculations, we found the position of the groups was determinable. For position B we found that the equation 7.27 + 0.85 = 8.12 was close to the peak found at 8.09ppm which tremendously helped in confirming the substance was in the ortho position. Because of the peak at 8.09, there were only two locations left for the split multiplicity peak that was shared between the two groups. These groups would have to be in a symmetrical position, and hence, the last possible position left for the methyl group to be in was position E.

The last position at C was concluded to be the peak at 7.44ppm through elimination, as there were no more outstanding peaks that were unaccounted for in the NMR.

Notes for X0766 IR Spectra

The IR spectra help reinforce or infer some of the possible structures of the unknown substance X0766. It is worth mentioning, however, that the IR spectra aren’t entirely concrete, as detected spectra as well as the position of spectra can vary relative to the structure group. On this IR in particular this may very well be evident. Some of the IR spectra inferences that have been made come referred from both the resources from Ashenhurst (2019), and the University of Otago: Chemistry Department (2022) Lab Manual.

With what we already know from the carbon 13 NMR and the indicated carboxylic acid region, we can see an IR band at the point 1673.93, which is very close to the wavenumber range of 1700-1680, a general location where can infer a possible carboxylic acid conjugated with an aromatic ring. This helps us identify, that while it is not perfect in range, this is possible the band for these elements inferring again the substance is an aromatic compound and has a carboxylic acid group. To add to this, the wavenumber range of 3300-2500, while is a very big range, can also infer O-H stretching on a carboxylic acid group, but the bands in this region are very broad.

Another band on the IR spectra shows a lone band at 734.38. This band is close to 755, the absence of multiple bands in this region and close to wavenumber 755 could indicate that the structure is a 1,2-disubstituted ortho benzene derivative which reinforces what was concluded in the hydrogen NMR analysis of the structure functional group positioning.

The last band worth noting on the IR spectrum is the methyl group, but strangely the expected range of 1355-1395 as well as 1430-1470 is absent. Although there is a band at 1407.97 with a smaller band which could be the methyl group, albeit wouldn’t be easily determinable without other analytical resources such as the NMR.

Conclusion of Elucidation

In finalization, I believe I have accurately deduced that the unknown substance named X0766, is in fact a compound known as o-Toluic Acid. An aromatic compound that is made up of a benzene ring, a carboxylic acid group, and a methyl group in the ortho position from the carboxylic acid. I also have additional confirmation that my assertion that this is toluic acid based on the AIST database (AIST 2019) which contains NMR and IR spectra data that closely parallels the spectra I had generated.

Summary

We were represented with an unknown substance labelled as X0766, it was a solid substance that was white, flaky, and had a strong flowery aroma. I and my lab partners had to determine what the substance was. With the substances we were provided molecular information that describe the percentages of different elements in the substance. Using these we were able to mathematically calculate an approximate empirical formula that for sample X0766 consisted of 8 carbons, 8 hydrogens, and 2 oxygen atoms. The formula of this compound aid significantly in understanding the structures of the unknown substance. The next step involved scientific spectra machines to generate an infrared (IR) and two nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrum graphs for each substance. The IR spectrums we generated can compare to known IR patterns for different structures of substance which helps identify some of the structures in the substance based on the number and size of the bands. The NMR spectrums help not only to confirm the observations that are made from the IR spectrums but also to determine chemical shifts and locations of structure on the unknown substance. Peaks on the NMR for each graph generated call for carbon-13 isotopes and hydrogen-1 isotopes which helped us determine two key structures, a carboxylic acid group of C-COOH, and a methyl group of C-CH3.

After figuring out the structure, we determined the unknown substance was ortho toluic acid or o-toluic-acid, which we then confirmed after checking online databases of spectra that paralleled the IR and NMR spectrums we had made.

Bibliography

AIST 2019, AIST:Spectral Database for Organic Compounds,SDBS, Aist.go.jp.
Ashenhurst, J 2019, Interpreting IR Specta: A Quick Guide – Master Organic Chemistry, Master Organic Chemistry.
Clark, J 2014a, interpreting C-13 NMR spectra, Chemguide.co.uk.
― 2014b, the background to nuclear magnetic resonance (nmr) spectroscopy, www.chemguide.co.uk.
University of Otago: Chemistry Department 2022, University of Otago CHEM306 Lab Manual.

This report was written for the University of Otago in the paper CHEM306 over a two week long lab cycle.

In this analysis, we aimed at doing a gas-phase chromatography analysis on three variant cooking herbs called thyme, which in particular is a herb rich in thymol. Using this analysis, we want to elucidate the variable quantities of thymol among different samples as a routine client checkup using the procedures from the laboratory book provided University of Otago: Chemistry Department (2022).

Methodology

The gas-chromatography used had the following configurations:

Model: Agilent 6850, HP-1, 30m, 0.320nm.
Column type: 0.25mm film
Carrier Gas and Flow Rate: Helium 1.9mL/min
Injection Volume, Temperature, and Injector Split: 1 microlitre, 270 degree Celsius, 10:1 split.
Column Temperature Programme: Finish temperature of 250 degrees Celsius with a start temperature of 50 degree Celsius. Rate of temperature increase was 20 degree Celsius a minute.

The amount of thymol used in this analysis was approximately 0.1 grams. However, CET323 TH03 was incorrectly weighed and instead is comprised of 0.997 grams.

Results

The calibration curve was calculated out of a selection of 18 different calibration tests using thymol and the internal standard solution. The calibration tests have notable features worth considering though. Some of the calibrations have broad peaks, indicating some of the analyte was moving more than others, ideally a a narrow peak is what we want, as this disturbs the precision of the experiment. Another issue that was noticed in some of the calibrations was forwarding peaks likely as a result of overloading the analyte.
Accordingly, the concentration isn’t massively difference across the samples with the exception of TH03. The reason for this though, is the amount of thyme used in CET323 was 0.997 grams as opposed to what was supposed to be 0.1 grams. Generally, though, the concentrations of the samples very similar which reflect their retention times across each GC chromatographical test.

Calculation (Using CET323 - TH03)

Thymol/IS = 5.563/8.732 = 0.6453
Approximate Thymol in Extract = (Thymol/IS) divided by the calibration slope = 0.6453/6.2178 = 0.1038
Approximate amount of Thymol in the Thyme = 0.1038/0.997 = 0.1041

Summary

We were provided three different thymol samples labelled TH01, TH02, and TH03. These were ran through a chromatogram against an internal standard to discern their thymol concentrations. The concentrations were found to be similar although TH03 was incorrectly weighed as instructed by the laboratory procedure. In order to accurately calculate the thymol as well, a calibration curve was made out of 18 calibration tests of which some had some notable gas chromatography structures relevant to obstruction of accuracy such as peak broadening and overloading.

References

University of Otago: Chemistry Department (2022). A Practical Course in Forensic Analytical Chemistry. 2022 Edition ed. University of Otago.

Appendix

This report was written for the University of Otago in the paper CHEM306 over a two week long lab cycle.

Since the advent of modern-day forensic testing of DNA, a great potential of information was attainable in pursuit of solving crimes that formerly, were not solvable by the methods of the time. But DNA on its own poses its own challenges and despite its perceivable preciseness in identifying individuals, laboratory limitations find uncertainty to be a continually reoccurring and troubling factor in forensic testing. The DNA Database called the Combined DNA index system (CODIS) is one of the widely known forensic programs that aims to utilize this DNA forensic testing and revolutionize forensic analysis. CODIS does this by implementing a database of DNA fingerprints that function off a selection of 13 different DNA markers called short-tandem repeats (STRs), these STRs are heritable and shared among local communities, but to share every single locus is probabilistically unlikely and henceforth is heralded as an effective means of identifying a unique DNA fingerprint of individuals. Crime scene DNA evidence used by the FBI is typically stored in the CODIS system and DNA collected from suspects is collected and run through their database to find any hits for a corresponding DNA fingerprint in their whole database (FBI n.d.).

As a general overview, DNA databasing has become a part of forensic testing because of its specificity in identifying a criminal. The idea is that as more information is logged into the database the higher the chances to solving a crime with the database, but therein lies a single problem, the unlikely scenario where a DNA database makes a DNA hit for the wrong person which varies from country and country based on the database they are in use of. Additionally, there are major considerations to be had as to whether it is wise to push legislation and policy to enforce these databases unto offenders including young children. The UK for instance tried to push their DNA database forensic tools further with an emphasis on solving crimes despite gathering innocent people’s data, and after public push back the idea was discarded with many new questions being raised on the human rights considerations and ethics that come with a DNA database program (Wallace et al. 2014). As for the effectives of these databases however, especially in cost and accessibility, new techniques are consistently being founded in order to best optimize the DNA databasing system for forensic analysis while maintaining reliability in the methodology. A notable statistic however, in database effectives as of 2021 found that developed databases from countries such as the UK and NZ that have played roles in nearly 70% of cases that were unsolved. Cost-wise too, it has shown that DNA database methods can be cost effective on a case-by-case basis but is not always successful in forensic analysis. And with more and more countries developing their own DNA databases its easy to see there is a great demand, and reportedly a good investment benefit to the inclusion of DNA forensic testing across the world (Wickenheiser 2022). However, this should not obfuscate the shortcomings of DNA testing, let alone its involvement in failure to impose just justice.

DNA Databases though have not just seen used in solving crimes though, but it has too also caught ire for their occasional involvement in a miscarriage of justice in the law. According to Cassell (2018) approximately in America, the wrongful conviction rate is turbulent, in that some claim it to be as low as 0.027% or sit in a range of 0.016% to 0.062%. Some sources argue, however, that the rate is as high as at least 1% and above. This is a crucially important statistic to understand given the challenge to provide just judgement and legal enforcement because miscarriages of justice do happen. Such as in the case of Raymond Easton, and at the time 49-year-old advanced Parkinson’s afflicted citizen who by chance claimed to be a 37 million to one chance had their DNA to match evidence DNA linked to a break in miles away. Raymond was arrested, and after some deliberation in court, a duplicate DNA test was done that cleared Raymond from the crime with the conclusion as to how this happened to be contamination in the lab the DNA testing was done in (The Herald 2006). But this alone is not the only application DNA testing has found, as it has also seen used inversely to exonerate people in the eyes of law with new-found evidence. DNA offers an important insight into how this wrongful conviction rate could be overturned, as DNA evidence is also technically useful to generate evidence in favour of the innocence of the defendant. For instance, in the case of a death row prisoner discussed by Steinbuch (2021), a man called Thibodeaux spent 16 years convicted after an accusation of rape and murder of their cousin. The man in question, during the investigation, had initially denied it until eventually giving in to the interrogative practices and falsely confessed only many years later to have been exonerated after a new piece of evidence through DNA analysis came out that pointed toward his innocence as Thibodeaux’s DNA was not linked to the rape that had occurred with the cousin.

When DNA evidence does work however it does have results to show for its effectiveness in supplementing evidence against a suspect and even solving criminal cases that have gone cold and without leads. For instance, DNA testing was key to solving a double homicide in 1956 65 years after its occurrence. This case was originally reported in Texas by three boys who came across the dead bodies of a teenage man and woman victim of a homicide involving a firearm with evidence to suggest a sexual assault had occurred. The victims, Bogle the 18-year-old male victim and Kalitzke the 16-year-old female victim had DNA information among other content stored after their autopsy; A history was also generated that found the two victims were lovers. The case had not led only up until one of the DNA samples collected in the form of a vaginal swap from Kalitzke, found sperm DNA that wasn’t her boyfriend, Bogle. They ran the DNA with the intention of at the least constructing a family tree, their testing led them to conclude the DNA belonged to a man called Kenneth Gould, a husband with children that had passed in 2007 (Pruitt-Young 2021).

Weaknesses

• DNA evidence that is present at scene could also be planted evidence by the offender, or unintentionally from an unaffiliated party.
• Retrievable DNA varies and generally only attainable in small amounts.
• DNA is subject to change in the event of mutation overtime, or even during collection resulting in subsequent added profiles, or old profiles to become obsolete
• Mishandling and misuse of DNA is possible.
• Different agencies and organizations may use different means of storing DNA information to others, meaning compiling a whole database or shared database for a largely globalizing world may be an obstacle.
• Major ethical concerns or privacy concerns.

Strengths

• Helpful in supplementing physical evidence to confirm presence, involvement, or possession of an item or location of interest.
• Helpful in supplementing other DNA related studies.
• Outlines useful populational data.
• Every person has a DNA fingerprint, which generally speaking unless they’re twins, is unique to the person expect in very unlikely circumstances. As more DNA processing tools are introduced, presumably the resolution increases.

As I see it, DNA databases pose a serious threat and concern to the privacy of people, but they are not without uses and purposes that outweigh some of the cons. Forensic analysts are constantly challenged by new problems that require new solutions, it would be a disservice to claim any one piece of evidence as being absolute evidence of criminal activity, but it helps to have a variety of tools to further close the gap of uncertainty in identifying an offender. This is where a quandary arises, as I believe DNA databases have their uses in crime scene analysis, but personally to just give DNA to be logged into a database crosses severe concerns of privacy, ethics, and additionally concerns for future applications and advancements relative to DNA data. To put it, given the disproportionate amount of crime by marginalized groups for a variety of reasons ranging from political to socio-economic, this disproportionality would reflect in a DNA database as well, which would mean it would only serve to impact those marginalized groups more (Ahmed 2019). If I cannot hold myself to the standard that I would not want that to happen to me, it cannot happen to anyone else. Although, there is one caveat to giving contributing personal DNA for a database, and that is if I personally were a suspect, and whether, after it has been concluded I am non-suspect, that the data collected be expunged from the database but this choice to donate to a database for this temporary use I stress is a decision by the donator.

DNA databases are not without uses, but it is far from infallible. It would be unwise to not use the technique, and when used it should be used to supplement a criminal investigation of more evidence albiet with awareness and scrutiny for it.

References

Ahmed, A 2019, Ethical Concerns of DNA Databases used for Crime Control | Bill of Health, Bill of Health, viewed 3 September 2022, https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2019/01/14/ethical-concerns-of-dna-databases-used-for-crime-control/>.
Cassell, PG 2018, Overstating America’s Wrongful Conviction Rate? Reassessing the Conventional Wisdom About the Prevalence of Wrongful Convictions, papers.ssrn.com, Rochester, NY, viewed 1 September 2022, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_i=327618.
FBI n.d., CODIS and NDIS Fact Sheet, Federal Bureau of Investigation, viewed 3 September 2022, https://www.fbi.gov/resources/dna-fingerprint-act-of-2005-expungement-policy/codis-and-ndis-fact-sheet>.
Pruitt-Young, S 2021, Detectives Just Used DNA To Solve A 1956 Double Homicide. They May Have Made History, NPR.org.
Steinbuch, Y 2021, Wrongly convicted man who spent 15 years on death row dies of COVID-19, New York Post, viewed 11 May 2022, https://nypost.com/2021/09/14/wrongly-convicted-man-who-spent-years-on-death-row-dies-of-covid/>.
The Herald 2006, Guilty by a handshake? Crime-scene DNA tests may not be as accurate as we are led to believe, The Herald: Scotland, viewed 1 September 2022, https://www.heraldscotland.com/default_content/12440889.guilty-handshake-crime-scene-dna-tests-may-not-accurate-led-believe/>.
Wallace, HM, Jackson, AR, Gruber, J & Thibedeau, AD 2014, ‘Forensic DNA databases–Ethical and legal standards: A global review’, Egyptian Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 57–63.
Wickenheiser, RA 2022, ‘Expanding DNA database effectiveness’, Forensic Science International: Synergy, vol. 4, p. 100226.

This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper MICR336 with an expected word count of 2000 plus or minus 10% with a total of ~2008 words. There are 7 references used for this essay.

It is known in nature and in history, the occurrence of fire has been a topic of particular discussion, both in man-made fires and the more increasingly concerning frequency of naturally occurring fires and how they affect their environments. It is important to question the severity of these fires on the microbial level, and how environmental changes invoke certain microbial responses as well as examine how these microbial responses shape the environment they inhabit. However, sources of fire differ, as do the atmospheres, climates, and environments that are burned. So exactly, what environmental factors have a significant impact or trend indicative of burn and microbial response?

While environmental factors differ from locale to locale, research seems to suggest that heat as a microbial and environmental disturbance, especially heat derived from a fire makes changes to plant and soil characteristics which can both give rise to new kinds of microbial communities and overall changes in the environment. These characteristics are directly tied to the degree of heat and burn severity. Some of the commonly examined alterations that burn causes in microbial environments and communities are changes to soil pH, various nutrient resources, and elimination of microbial communities that perished to the burning opening potentially new microbial opportunities (Adkins et al. 2020). As a result of these changes in these microbial environments from burns, there is a suggestion that different native and non-native microbial communities may out-compete different species under these stresses which also in turn have implicit consequences for plant and fungal growth in the region (Hebel, Smith & Cromack 2009). Some taxa both fungal and bacterial have been found in other lines of research that seem to work as “fire responders” that were abundant and identifiable after a fire. There had also been notable recordings of post-fire taxa using the resulting carbon resources and changes to the nitrogen cycling of the soil that may have positive effects on plant growth (Whitman et al. 2019).

Microbes that come to grow into these communities thereby either thrive or struggle against the newfound conditions, which is important and key to understanding the effects of burns in the wider environment. Given modern-day implications of increasing wildfire breakouts as well, understanding the patterns and long-term effects of a burned environment and how microbial communities function within those conditions may be pivotal to wider scientific applications of these observations. The aim of this analytical report is to use plant burn data sourced from an article by Dove et al. (2021) to outline and identify patterns that are potentially indicative of microbial response to plant burn disturbances and determine which phyla are responsible for this response.

- N.O. of Samples: 165 (Pruned to 162)
- Treatments/Variables: 36 Sample Variables)
- Number of OTUs identified: 23955 Taxa of 8 Taxonomic Ranks)


Hypothesis: The status of plant burn acts as a stressor that invokes microbial response through changed in the nutrient environment and uptake of carbon pool resources and the carbon can be used as an indicator of these respondent microbes.

Null Hypothesis: The status of plant burn acts as a stressor that doesn’t invoke a microbial response through changes in the nutrient environment and uptake of carbon pool resources and the carbon resource cannot be used as an indicator of these respondent microbes.

Methodology and Results

For this analysis, the dataset originally was comprised of 165 samples until it was firstly pruned to remove all sequences in the data that were less than 100 sequences. This is done so that the data points of interest are the only data to be used. Once pruned, the data was then rarefied ending with a sample size of 162.

As shown in figure 1, the species richness rises up until the sequence sample size hits about 1000 in size. Hence the rarefication was revised at a rarefaction depth of 1000, where richness stops rapidly increasing. The total number of reads for the OTUs as well as the samples are depicted in Figure 2 which shows that the sample data covers ranges near up to 25,000 with nreads as high as 10,000.

Alpha Diversity

The alpha diversity of the data was determined using a fisher exact test with a spearman correlation denomination. On figure 3, immediately evident is two different clusters of data with an approximate spearman correlation equal to -0.47. This indicates a relationship between the alpha diversity measure against the carbon quantity measure in which as alpha diversity decreases, carbon quantity increases. The P-Value of the fisher test is according to calculations equal to 8.962e-10 and rounded to 0 on the figure. This P-Value is significant in indicating that there is a relationship in alpha diversity between two different populations relative to carbon levels.

Beta Diversity

To begin with Beta diversity, we started with generating a stress plot to visualise the scattering of the data to see if the data appropriate fits in ordination as shown in figure 4. By using a binary test, it was discerned the stress lies at 0.1795 which according to ordination guidelines outlined by Clarke (1993) is within usable ranges.

The beta diversity data was plotted along a non-metric multidimensional scaling plot against a bray dissimilarity matrix as shown in figure 5. Similarly, to the alpha diversity test, there is clear clustering of samples low in carbon content with a lot of scattering for higher carbon content samples.

Lastly in Figure 6, again we can see two different clusters of data for both low carbon pools and high carbon pools. Also again, we can see a clear trend and correlation that as MDS1 increases, as does the carbon levels in the samples with a P-Value much lower than 0.05 indicating a strong significance that there is a relationship for the microbial groups relative to carbon pool levels between communities in beta diversity.

Comparisons of Taxa

Figure 7 shows the community composition comparisons by phylum plotted against their relative abundance to carbon levels for the test. Of the 18 different phyla groups, there are some clear communities that are low in abundance with other groups indicatively being more variable and plentiful. Of these groups, we can see that Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Acidobacteria seem to be the more taxonomically relevant phyla of the data. These abundant phyla as well seem to have more data points clustered in high carbon levels with fewer in lower carbon levels, although Acidobacteria is very spread out compared to the other more abundant phyla.

Following on from the phyla comparisons, based on the level of burn too, we can see which of the phyla are more common. Based on Figure 8, one observation for acidobacteria is that is not that prevalent and decreases in abundance when subjected to burn. Although Actinobacteria, Firmicutes, and Proteobacteria are very dominant compared to other phyla groups and seem to be non-affected or even grown in a burned environment as opposed to being in an unburned environment. With consideration of the variability of carbon levels across different phyla, we can determine that the microbial communities of Bacteriodetes, Proteobacteria, Firmicutes and Actinobacteria are the key communities of interest in surviving, and potentially growing after plant burns through the use of carbon pool nutrients thereafter the burn.

Discussion

Concerning the phyla comparisons, it is evident that some bacterial groups are not affected negatively, and instead remain or grow because of burn. There are a few reasons why this might be the case. In the event of plant burn, it introduces a stressor on the environment that affects the microbial communities of the plant and soil. In theory, microbial communities that are either fire resistant, or resourceful of the products of a plant burn are likely to thrive over microbial communities that are not as capable. In addition, the burn of the environment will result in none surviving communities being reduced or expunged any competition of the environment, which offers opportunities to the surviving microbes to further grow and take off from the resources circumventing any obstacles that otherwise would have been preventing for the microbes (Adkins et al. 2020). This would mean that the phyla such as Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria, and Bacteroidetes might be subject to this effect as hence why their abundances are either unchanged or greatened after the event of plant burn.

This finding would seem to reinforce some findings from previous studies of this same phenomenon, some of the abundant phyla observed in this report have positive responses to fire induce stresses and burns according to Adkins, Docherty & Miesel (2022). Some phyla groups they found tend to have a high abundance in post-fire conditions as a result of the microbial community changes and environmental changes much like this report. Actinobacteria and Firmicutes for instance are generally heat-resistant taxa that can form spores, and therefore can survive burn stressors. Bacteriodetes and Proteobacteria on the other hand respond to fire as more nitrogen and carbon become available nutrients. However, these bacteria and their successes are largely predicated on the severity of the burn and the pool amounts of nutrients in the microbial biomass. Curiously though some research seems to indicate the different types of woodland and trees tend to cause unique variations in the nutrient pools. In addition to this insight, microbial activity was shown to increase proportionally to changes in the soil and microbial biomass of Carbon as well as Nitrogen (Singh et al. 2021).

To conclude from the findings of this report, it is evident based on our data, that there is a response mediated by forest burn that particularly gives rise to microbial communities, and these new communities especially of the Proteobacteria and Bacteriodetes tend to use nutrient resources on and in the soil after the burn such as carbon to facilitate their growth after surviving plant burn circumstances. Given the significance of the alpha and beta diversities as well as the clear differences in carbon-heavy clustering and abundance differences relative to burn; the null hypothesis can be rejected as burn seems to invoke a microbial response via changes in the nutrient environment, and the uptake of those changes in the form of carbon pool resources is a useful indicator for burn-responding microbes. As such this both reinforces and puts forward there are microbial communities that respond to burn through increased carbon uptake which in turn will have sequential effects on the environment of those microbes.

Future Research

Given the rising concerns with worldly phenomena such as climate change as well as the installation of institutions on or the destruction of landscapes, there are a variety of unique variables that may be integral to furthering our understanding of microbial responses to burn. One of the major considerations that might be important is the distinction between sources for what causes a burn such as man-made fires via fuels and oils versus naturally occurring wildfires and disasters causing fires. The source of fire in particular is quite useful to know, as sources of fire can be subject to compositional differences from other sources which may result in other kinds of nutrient resources as well as unique carbon pooling.

Otherwise, this report is subject to some limitations in its investigation that ought to be addressed relative to the research proposal. Namely, future research should aim to outline the locale either natural or laboratory facilitated that analyses are conducted on due to geographical variation. Additionally, the type of plant as well as the state of growth thereof the plant. Each of these variables opens up new avenues for research on the topic of microbial burn response and by all means, ought to be considered for future studies.

References

Adkins, J, Docherty, KM, Gutknecht, JLM & Miesel, JR 2020, ‘How do soil microbial communities respond to fire in the intermediate term? Investigating direct and indirect effects associated with fire occurrence and burn severity’, Science of The Total Environment, vol. 745, p. 140957.
Adkins, J, Docherty, KM & Miesel, JR 2022, ‘Copiotrophic Bacterial Traits Increase With Burn Severity One Year After a Wildfire’, Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, vol. 5.
CLARKE, KR 1993, ‘Non-parametric multivariate analyses of changes in community structure’, Austral Ecology, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 117–143.
Dove, NC, Klingeman, DM, Carrell, AA, Cregger, MA & Schadt, CW 2021, ‘Fire alters plant microbiome assembly patterns: integrating the plant and soil microbial response to disturbance’, New Phytologist, vol. 230, no. 6, pp. 2433–2446.
Hebel, CL, Smith, JE & Cromack, K 2009, ‘Invasive plant species and soil microbial response to wildfire burn severity in the Cascade Range of Oregon’, Applied Soil Ecology, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 150–159.
Singh, D, Sharma, P, Kumar, U, Daverey, A & Arunachalam, K 2021, ‘Effect of forest fire on soil microbial biomass and enzymatic activity in oak and pine forests of Uttarakhand Himalaya, India’, Ecological Processes, vol. 10, no. 1.
Whitman, T, Whitman, E, Woolet, J, Flannigan, MD, Thompson, DK & Parisien, M-A 2019, ‘Soil bacterial and fungal response to wildfires in the Canadian boreal forest across a burn severity gradient’, Soil Biology and Biochemistry, vol. 138, p. 107571.

This openbook exam was written for the University of Otago in the paper GEND209 with an expected word count 1900 plus or minus 10% (1912 total). References were not requested for this assignment, and all content draws from learned content of the course. There is also an additional section of two questions each approximately 300 words each.

The victim is a continuously turbulent subject in criminal justice and media-socio-cultural debate whose existence is judged by the moral trends shared and passed on through historical accounts of public righteousness. One of the leading influences on defining virtue, morality, and pragmatism comes from the commonplace religious followers whose teachings continue to hold judicial and social capital. Christianity in Western society while significantly less omnipresent in the present day, has branded itself into the common philosophy of what is just, insofar as shaping the reactions, processes, and relationships that surround criminal offending and victimhood. In more ways than one, Jan Van Dijk in their work “Free the Victim” written in 2009 critiques the intimate relationships of victims and Christianity through the exploration of victim experience, the experience of social spectators, and the scriptures that etymologically and epistemologically define what and how it is to be a victim.
When we assess what is meant by the Christian values that surround social response to victimhood, we must ask to epistemological and etymological meanings of victim in the contexts of Christian societies. Western countries such as the US have a rich history immersed in Christian belief systems, the word victim itself from the religious angle represents something of a powerful sacrifice. In the Christian faith, Jesus Christ was made victim to a Jewish tribunal death by crucifixion after he proclaimed status as the king of the Jews, as part of a mockery and punishment. Through his sacrifice, Jesus is recognised as a saviour to mankind, and his sacrifice of blood is done out of selflessness for humanity’s redemption. Sacrifices religiously too aren’t done without purpose, as offerings to supernatural forces are done to bring about goodness in times of tension and turmoil. When Van Dijk evokes the word victim, this idea is largely what they refer to. According to Van Dijk, the victim was first used in English to describe the of experience Jesus Christ which thereby ascribes a deeper religious interpretation to how victimhood is interpretable. To be a victim therefore is a high proclamation, and the sacrifice of victimhood is morally ought to be a position of altruism as Jesus Christ did.
Jesus is described as a passive victim in his crucifixion, whose passion and forgiveness of his killers surpass any amount of resentment for them. The central theme is dying for the ones you love. The ideal victim in the image of Christian virtue is expected to “carry their suffering gracefully and offer their attackers unconditional forgiveness.” (Van Dijk 2008, page 20). Also, in contrast, Van Dijk states that “Such forgiveness serves the interests of both community and offender but not necessarily the interests of the victims themselves.” (Van Dijk 2008, page 20). Valuable, if we grant Christian values being foundationally relevant to victimhood as Van Dijk suggests, the public perception perceives victimization as a status to upholster honour in the name of stilling social turmoil. Perplexingly then, victims are unmined in the victimization process by being presumed a responsibility variable enough to be a deeply conflicting undertaking. Rather the victim's support for their ordeal is hampered as compassion for their experience isn’t unconditional as their forgiveness is.
In the modern day, victims employ their voices in writing to convey experiences, but the capacity to tell an experience doesn’t confer persuasiveness to the reader. Narratives are often patternable with themes of resentment, and anger denouncing the offender, overcoming adversity for a survivor is paramount to internalizing their strength. Even more notable is the selflessness of victims to support others through activism. Van Dijk points toward protagonists of victim narratives such as Natascha Kampush, who provides rich accounts of the dynamics of deviant and strong victims, who neatly fit many of the patterns of victimhood and resilience. However, such victimhood patterns are contradictory to the ordinary and expected to be perceived victimhood narrative, as the judgement of society has to clash with the articulation of the victim in conjunction with media and bias. Individuals subjugated to such social judgements can thus become delegitimized victims whose story may not be told readily, well enough, or conformly enough to be properly appreciated, and hence victims especially non-ideal victims whose social position isn’t in line with common Christian idealism, are rendered invisible. Even on the political scale, Christian values especially patriarchal values result in differential treatment of victims such as those of marital rape. Marital rape continues to be a polarizing cultural phenomenon because while rape itself is handled with severity, marital rape is handled more recklessly. Ideologically the difference in rape severity is stringent on the religious belief of women’s position as subservient to the man in marriage, which to Van Dijk’s credit reduces the agency of women furthermore and only continues to shape invisible and idealism in victims by the public. This is also true in relationships of marginalization such as non-Christian sanctioned LGBT relations that in some religious texts and communities are demonized and undermined.
Connecting the imagery of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion through Van Dijk’s interpretation along with victims today; victims are given a choice to be a passive victim or have the media experience good enough to articulate themselves in an environment that is actively hostile to victims. Symbolically as Christ forgave his killers, Van Dijk suggests the victim must be as he, lest they become sacrificed to scapegoat for the problems perceived by the wider society. In the religious hodgepodge, you need to be a victim in the way society wants to see a victim, and by acting beyond the expectations of a victim, a victim opens themselves up to suspicion, hatred, and criticism.
Where all these concepts culminate is the idea of the “ideal victim”. Ideal victims as a concept are individuals afflicted by an offence and identifiable or portrayable in such a way as to evoke emotional responses, empathy, and relatability. Such identifiers admit them a state of perceivable undeserving suffering, often laying foundations for outrage and fear for safety at the indirect behest of the offending party. Core to the societal reaction is the invigoration orchestrated by media in conjunction with common social and cultural morality and values. Conveniently many social and cultural values, to the credit of Christianity’s religious influence, tend to coincide with one another concerning the tarnishing of a victim from an ill offender. Victims who are not ideal due to a lack of conformance to what makes an ideal victim are excluded from the social reaction relevant to ideal victims via exclusion and invisibility.
The ideal victim often tends to carry the characteristics of an innocent do-gooder whose circumstances, relationships, and history do not contradict a puritanical perception of engendered roles and expectations. For instance, women who could perceivably be part of one’s victimization through precipitating the crime would not be ideal. But a woman of strong family orientation, modestly dressed, fair, white, woman, faithful, and with a promising future among other features are assertedly ideal for an ideal victim image. It is the victim image based on the severity of the victimhood that garners exposure, either voluntarily or involuntarily, Large-scale scale cases are sensationalistic because their exposure is great, and draws attention. Part of the reason why ideal victimhood is used isn’t to summon compassion for the ideal victim, but rather to “demonize the offender as a totally evil person” (Van Dijk 2008, page. 15).
  Culturally speaking, Christianity is grounded very deeply in puritanism and social altruism. In the context of a victim, Christianity asks for a victim to “love not just our kind but also our enemies and to practice forgiveness” (Van Dijk 2009, page. 22). Through this expectation of forgiveness, the impact against an offender from a victim is softened, but the onus remains on the victim to forgive on behalf of the offender. The inability to forgive, which in extreme victim cases isn’t unexpected, draws the ire of Christian values as the principle of love thy enemies is forgone and the passivity most specially associated with women is discarded. The ire of Christian values can then open a victim up to scapegoating and shift of blame unto the victim, often referring to the victim as an accomplice and instigating factor as a form of secondary victimization. Part of the reason for this as Van Dijk points out, is that non-conformance to ideal victimhood requires a performance, but a performance is largely up to the scrutiny of interpretation of the consumers of the content. For instance, Van Dijk refers to the case of Madeline McCann, whose secondarily victimized parents due to television appearances didn’t passably appear as victims which led to doubts about their authenticity. Van Dijk explains this is because of doubts about their parental competency which evolved into claims of their hand in the case as perpetrators turning them into scapegoats for the offense which was only worsened by the media leaning into the scapegoat narrative. Victims in this framework are as a result more inclined towards silence and passivity in the guise of Van Dijk’s ideal victim Christian narrative as the more outspoken a victim is, the more they incriminate themselves for secondary victimization.
Van Dijk links the ideal victim directly to the Christian ethos of the meaning of the word victim directly in how society reacts to discontent victims. To shove ideal victimhood leads directly into secondary victimization in the form of victim blaming and scapegoating as by “blaming the victim for their fate, we reassure ourselves we live in a just world” (Van Dijk 2009, page. 13). It is then, as a religious ritual to sacrifice something for the greater good, the victim is sacrificed involuntarily for not adhering to their engendered role. The social reaction, in turn, discards the victim’s agency and conditionally refers to them as a victim. In regards to Natasha Kampush, Van Dijk also demonstrates the unrest surrounding how a victim is treated alters the validity of the victim. Natasha was a victim celebrity whose experience enraptured the victimhood arena until reports were discovered some of the treatment she received in the late stages of her kidnapping. Van Dijk purports Natasha was painted to be a participant in her kidnapping after an influx of compassion suddenly stopped by reports of going with her kidnapper to a skiing resort. Or consider the victimized family of Madeline McCann, whose lack of passivity only led them to be secondarily victimized to justify and cull unrest.
Jan Van Dijk’s Free the Victim, I believe makes a compelling case for the prevalence of Christian values having an “unspoken but powerful” impact on the experiences of victims and social responses to victims. The media, social, and cultural perceptions of what makes a compelling victim are all entwined in a perception of passivity that parallels the altruistic vision of Christ’s death. To be outspoken as a victim is to be provocative against the common emotional response and experience of hearts and minds that merely read of the victim and offender. Van Dijk is literal in that it is impactful in an unspoken and powerful way, for victims are not to speak for their own sake. That provocation as Van Dijk attests and reinforces, is an affront to the values of what makes an ideal victim, ideal to the commons, and it is used poetically in the religious sense to promote “real” victims and sacrifice fallible victims in reactive victim scapegoating to make up for the problems asserted not by the victim but made into the victim by the populace.

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Mini Bibliography

Van Dijk, J 2008, ‘In the shadow of Christ ? On the use of the word “victim” for those affected by crime’, Criminal Justice Ethics, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 13–24.
― 2009, ‘Free the Victim: A Critique of the Western Conception of Victimhood’, International Review of Victimology, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1–33.

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Section B1

Question: Provide an argument in favour of, and an argument against, replacing the term ‘victim’ with ‘survivor’.

The term survivor is entirely built on securing the image and individualism of the offended party. To be a victim is to have been irrevocably damaged and to hold the status of victim also pertains to an inability to overcome that of which victimized them. There also exist cultural symbolisms and meanings that edit how the word victim is perceived, to what extent and in which way is one victimized? By an offender, a system, or circumstance, the word victim tends to betray the complexity by which circumstance and perspective exist. The term survivor instead of victim ameliorates the negative cultural connotations that come with the word victim, and it instead ascribes the ability for the offended party to move on from their afflicting event and heal actively.
In contrast, to be a victim infers legally to be someone whose been legitimately affected in some way. The word victim informs that someone hasn’t healed and that there is a need for support, understanding, and progression to move on. It also holds the offending party to the blame as a survivor is beyond the event as the word victim resonates in media sensationalisation with the public as it evokes certain cultural meanings and ideals where survivor does not. Such meaning and ideals can be detrimental to the victim in question, but it draw attention and action quickly to a situation of importance which as a tool in activism, is arguably useful. Although the victim excels where the survivor doesn’t, survivors are given the responsibility of moving on if incorrectly labelled.
The terminology of victim and survivor is ultimately a matter of the choice, and circumstance of victims/survivors, both having strengths in language for different reasons and therefore are equally delicate and feasible for use in victimological contexts.

Section B2

Question: How and by whom was the term ‘victim blame’ first defined, and what is the value of this concept in victimology?

The term victim-blaming came from William Ryan, whose use of the term referred to the use of hostility and fixation on the defects of a victim to justify and soften the blows of legitimate inequality whose inequality begat victimhood. Explanations and mechanisms of victim blaming are conceptualized in early victimological theoretical accounts by Hans von Hentig and Benjamin Mendelsohn whose victimological theory included the victim in criminal acts.
Victims were considered possible active participants of a criminal act, for a victim should be present for an offender to exist, and a motive should be present for an offence. One of the theories to explain this phenomenon was called “victim precipitation” which suggested that the victim played a key part in which a crime is precipitated thereby handing over some responsibility for the crime to the victim by provoking a crime. Hence the victim is responsible for “blame” for what had made them a victim, hence “victim blaming”. Reactive victim scapegoating is also done, in which a victim is reacted to by the social and cultural observers of their plight, at the victim’s expense usually by discrediting them, sometimes by blaming them in part.
Socially this shift from looking at the crime committed to the victim who precipitates is very important in victimology, for concurrent social attitudes to a woman who walks the night alone of various circumstances such as wear, whereabouts, and social connections is placed upon a spectrum of blame should something criminal occur to them. It’s a reverse lens by which to look at criminal offending introducing the victim into the thoroughfare as a more prominent variable of offending called “positivist victimology”.

This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper GEND209 with an expected word count 2500 plus or minus 10% (2455 total). A total of 13 references were used.

The political sphere as a constant in society continues to evolve to the ever-changing and turbulent public opinion and political landscape. The marketplace of ideas as it were, ought to be understood between more than just one regiment of belief, much as there exist multiple forms of feminism for instance, there are also multiple forms of practising those feminisms. Victimology concerning victim politics voices a divide between what is meant by a victim rights movement as opposed to victim activism.
In Western society, there ought to exist a system of law and morality as decided by the state as answered to the democratic masses, although the meaning of law and morality as cultural issues become complex dilutes. In a case that is dubbed “the Stanford Sexual Assault case” as overviewed by Nickie Phillips and Nicholas Chagnon (2018, pp. 48-49, 54-56), victimology can find a fascinating mobilization of victim politics in forms of carceral feminism and penal populism. The Stanford case follows a sexual assault and rape of an unconscious victim by a perpetrator called Brock Turner, whose assault was intercepted by two Samaritans who described a disturbed recount of the victim’s circumstances. What riled people up, is the court settled on a light sentencing of six months in prison. Both these victim political entities of penal populism and carceral feminism are deeply rooted across the political victimological theory in which the public cultural perspective contains allusions to the preference for state-authoritative sentencing. Part of the reason for these entities’ omnipresence is due to the perception of rampant rape culture. The outrage became a political spectacle, whose adjacency to the criminal justice system made for an effective political strategy for politicians to secure votes for “tough on crime” promises of policy. What followed was a bloodthirsty approach to cultural victim politics, that went on to cleave society on matters of victims and offenders in ways that would go on to fail to solve problems they assertedly began to cause.

The Political Arena of Carceral Feminism and Penal Populism

Victims of sexual abuse, rape, and other sex-adjacent crimes are subject to a great amount of attention that finds itself atomizing between eliminating the offences and supporting the survivors of these atrocities. Carceral feminism is a major contender in this field and is referred to as according to Terwiel (2019, pp. 424-427) a movement that wants to integrate higher amounts of policing and prosecutorial systems and harsher punishments as a means of solving sexual and gender violence. The beliefs of carceral feminism have friction with other feminist movements such as those of prison abolitionist perspectives, especially given that carceral values are documented to have incidentally reinforced intersectional injustices to marginalized communities despite carceral feminist goals. Although neither side of the fence on the carceral topic is necessarily correct, and conversationally has been diluted into a base binary that is in reality a lot more complex.
Clare McGlynn (2022, pp.3-4) affirms that the carceral feminist model and its critics such as anti-carceral feminists and prison abolitionist feminists tend to rely too closely on binaries of justice, and the goals of a reformative movement for victims and institutions are too ambitious and multi-faceted. To lean too far into a carceral motive or non-carceral motive opts for consequences on either side at the potential expense of security or the victim. So, what McGlynn and Terwiel thereby purport, is that both motives can be coterminous with foundational multi-leveled consideration and transformation of both public opinion, the carceral state, and the government among other institutions. To complement that kind of transformation is a call and push for what they refer to as “continuum thinking” which promotes critical thinking approaches to step to the complexity of criminalization, the justice system, and those including minority communities who interact or ought to interact with them.
Although politically, perspectives on crime are less pragmatic; Penal Populism refers to the phenomena in which politicians to secure public interest for their electoral benefit take advantage of public concerns over alleged levels of crime by taking a policy stance that is tough on crime advocating for reinforcement of the criminal justice system, and harsher punishment systems for offenders. Public opinion is atomized as demonstrated by a psychological study by Côté-Lussier (2016, pp. 235-236, 243-244). Looking into the populace of the UK, US, and Canada, trends correlated with a desire for harsher punishments in combination with specific factors that are emotionally driven by anger, disgust, and inconsiderate of preceding factors. Even while these attitudes in favour of harsher punishment, are frivolous complementary to trends of sentencing and offending. These perspectives of harsher punishment from Côté-Lussier’s study also link the punitive attitude toward what they refer to as a “racial animus’ in which inequality between intersectionality such as race informs severities of the penal perspective. Albeit this study contains critical limitations to its research, it provides an opening to a model to describe attitudes of criminals albeit from a compromising construction model that perceives otherness as a factor for offending.
These factors for a political stance, neatly parallel with reporting surrounding victimology such as the works of Lepore (2018) as perspectives begin to undertake more institutional approaches without recognizing the compromission of victims. In turn, penal populism has turned victimization and offending around victims as an effective propagandistic tool subject to the vulnerability of security which fuels negative perspectives on how to solve problems on victim rights. It is then victim rights movements that come to represent each side of the political debate on victims’ rights through movements like #MeToo, and thus coalesce a legitimate debate on effective justice.

On Victim Activism: Reformation and Critical Analysis

Victim activism often takes the form of an institutional or communal entity in society, that works to provide agency to a group of people. As an activist movement, victim activism seeks to seek out mechanisms and systems that drive victimization narrative and perceptions, on a foundational level. Such activism thereby requires a deep critical analysis of underpinning social, cultural, and judicial systems to incite large-scale change. Nicole O’Leary and Simon Green (2020, pp. 160-162, 165-167) recognize there exists a failure of justice that provokes a palatable pattern in victim activism campaigns. O’Leary and Green describe the dissolution of crime management in conjunction with victims, adjacent to the complex institutional structure of political manipulation and social-cultural commentary that pushes political agenda. An example of such an agenda is observable in the research by Elizabeth Whalley (2020, pp. 213- 214)
who highlights concurrent systems that solve problems of victimization such as crisis centres, when integrated with legal-institutional forces like police, are counter-intuitive to the process of supporting victims. Concerning the #MeToo movement in Sweden, victim activists referred to their movement as an advocation for “pragmatic justice” rather than the oppositional appeals to “carceral justice”. From the perspectives of Lena Karlsson (2024, pp. 3-7) they voice those feminist perspectives of justice have delineated the pointers of success in victim justice, referring to a quote by McGylnn and Westmarland “Justice is a lived ongoing and ever-evolving experience and process, rather than an ending or result”. What came about from #MeToo was thereby a moment in activist history to inform of the lived experiences and allow people to speak out to communicate as a form of the justice process. This was especially important to activists in what is referred to as “the justice gap”. As Loney-Howes, Longbottom & Fileborn (2024, pp. 3-6) describe, the activist movement pushes towards centres against sexual violence, and sheltered and support services for the disenfranchised with the philosophy of helping victims over punishing criminals. The “justice gap” continues the pattern of justice not being a goal of incarceration, but rather a variable ongoing process of multiple unique factors. Although traditional perspectives on justice remain in the mainstream, victim activism, through gradual change can refocus feminist and state resources into victim support over the interrogative carceral system.
Critiques of the criminal justice system's competency with victims are only reinforced by the works of Lara Bazelon and Aya Gruber (2020). One of the matters broached in the context of #MeToo is victims whose needs transcend that of otherwise unfulfilling carceral and policing systems. One popular solution is restorative programs that promote instead healing victims and prevention of continued offences. Part of the reason Bazelon and Gruber purport this alternative support is that the service is providing the victims more support rather than disposably using the victims as a tool for the carceral system. Turning a victim into a proverbial tool has wrought more damage than help to victims as it tends to victimize marginalized groups, prioritize, and approach confounding factors under-managed by the carceral system in unsatisfactory ways.
Bazelon alongside Bruce Green (2019, pp. 7-12, 18-22) analyzed the feminist divide in depth, at the start of the developments of victims' rights, the movement focused on finer outcomes for women across different circumstances such as marital rape. However, the aim was distorted into what is called an “improvement of the criminal adjudicative process” under the presumption that punishment of offenders is optimal remediation for a wronged individual. The victim activist side of matters opted to instead reform the way that core systems interact with victims which believed punishment was only a deterrent, and arguably not the greatest deterrent. The greatest deterrent was for victims in the carceral system who would have to trudge through their victimization and marginalization from media narrative to ideology and institutionalized focuses.
Thereby and assertedly the problem is a very politically fractured multi-level structure of foundational socio-cultural and political intersections in victimization, justice, and offending which victim activism seeks to resolve, because what we already have and more thereof doesn’t solve the origin of many victimological problems.

Victim Rights Movements: Complacency and Layman Cultural Morality

Victim rights movements in contrast to victim activism are in simple terms, significantly less actively involved with the victims, and their victimization events and more concerned with victim rights and entitlements within the criminal justice system. Definitionally, it is victim rights movements that voice public opinion to incite change and shape public action on the legislative level to ascribe rights to victims. Holder, Kirchengast & Cassell (2020, pp. 3-4) suggest human rights as perceivably absent and are a progenitor of injustice whilst absent. There within victim injustice, victim rights movements seek to remedy it either by using already preestablished mechanisms to further include victims, and victim rights into the institutional contract of legal parties. Hence giving the right to know about one’s rights, summon those rights, and have entitled to those rights leads to justice for a victim. The challenge, however, of victim rights movements, ultimately comes down to the moral philosophy argumentation and efficacy of integrating victim rights effectively into systems.
Some victim rights movements such as that of the #MeToo movement are divisive. #MeToo became a social media phenomenon of victims, which were mostly women concerning generally sexual and partner violence, who would tell their stories of their negative experiences. Laurie Kohn (2019, pp. 563-569) describes the turbulence of the movement, from its anonymity of allegations to the extreme effort onlookers took to take the allegations seriously or even challenge allegations and their victims, especially in the case of high-profile celebrities. Although efforts were largely unsuccessful in any matters outside of giving a voice to victims and raising awareness by sparking debate, the problem was without a clear prescription for justice and veritable communication.
One prescription however, as reported by The New Yorker writer Jill Lepore (2018) suggests that victim rights have “become a bad marriage of both feminism and conservatism”. What Jill means by a bad marriage, is that within the US, feminism which is a purpose for women's rights and equality bears inconsistencies when engaged with the punitive carceral system of conservative justice. The words of a victim and the circumstance of an alleged offender can drive emotional divisiveness over a factual basis for justice through what is referred to as “victim-impact statements” based on the “dealworthiness” of the offending party and the victim's empathized experience. Jill voices that the victim rights movement today, especially with #MeToo as a present force, has become a hostile system less focused on hearing a victim, and instead more focused on attacking perpetrators in an attempt to stop offending without acknowledging the inverse damage this approach can cause thus “speaking their truth” unwittingly to the critical factors underappreciated. Storytelling and attempting to resonate and relate with the cultural populace are therefore an important tool for victim rights movements.
According to Jennifer Dunn (2004, pp. 237-239, 242-245) Due to the nature of such movement methodologies though, they have shaped negative images and stereotypes that to some degree contradict the support of victims by constructing images of victims and thereby producing them, which historically have incidentally excluded or failed to account for profound factors of the movement’s goals. For instance, victim precipitation, ideal heroic, and stigma victims, all of which appeal to emotional responses as well as political social and cultural responses are only a few of the mechanisms victim rights movements have in the toolbox of their transitional process. Such processes are often too opposed by the alternative victim activist position. Although due to the empathetic effectiveness of issues of #MeToo and cultural common morality in addition to political exploitation, calls upon emotion and socio-cultural biases strongly determine justice by changing what is meant by the term “victim” for instance. The problem persists that in media and in political communities, to be a victim is as much a punishment as the victimization process due to how society manages victims. Henceforth, victim rights movements tend to split off from the victim activist perspective as distortions of justice and efficacy become too great in cultural, social, and political atmospheres inhabited by the common public.

Conclusion

While the topic of political fracturing in the contexts of the regimental split between victim rights movements and victim activism, while there exists some overlap in their goals, the angle by which both positions tackle the problem of victim politics is largely contradictory. Victim rights movements are very complacent trying to affirm legal systems of punishment and victim entitlements, without acknowledging where victims and offenders come from in the first place. As it stands, victim rights movements while serviceable, can be profoundly dissatisfactory to the wellbeing of victims and spells terrible political unrest in sectors even beyond victim rights. Victim activists, however, focus more carefully on the disorders of systems victims already have, and seek both reform and reconsideration on how to approach differential problems of victimization. Hence the divide comes down to a void in recognition of solutions, and a divergence in focus on victim versus victimization events largely orchestrated by media stage and social topical climate.

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Bazelon, LA & Green, BA 2019, ‘Victims’ Rights from a Restorative Perspective’, SSRN Electronic Journal.
Dunn, JL 2004, ‘The Politics of Empathy: Social Movements and Victim Repertoires’, Sociological Focus, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 235–250, viewed 7 May 2024, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20832237.
Holder, R, Kirchengast, T & Cassell, P 2020, ‘Transforming crime victims’ rights: from myth to reality’, International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 1–13.
Karlsson, L 2024, ‘#MeToo Activism as Pragmatic Justice Seeking’, Feminist legal studies, Springer Science+Business Media.
Kohn, LS 2019, ‘#MeToo, Wrongs Against Women, and Restorative Justice’, GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works, pp. 1–27, viewed 8 May 2024, https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2793&context=faculty_publications.
Lepore, J 2018, The Rise of the Victims’-Rights Movement, The New Yorker, viewed 13 May 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/21/the-rise-of-the-victims-rights-movement.
Loney-Howes, R, Longbottom, M & Fileborn, B 2024, ‘Gender-Based Violence and Carceral Feminism in Australia: Towards Decarceral Approaches’, Feminist legal studies, Springer Science+Business Media.
McGlynn, C 2022, ‘Challenging anti-carceral feminism: Criminalisation, justice and continuum thinking’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 93, p. 102614.
O’Leary, N & Green, S 2020, ‘From Invisible to Conspicuous: The Rise of Victim Activism in the Politics of Justice’, Victimology, pp. 159–183.
Phillips, ND & Chagnon, N 2018, ‘“Six Months Is a Joke”: Carceral Feminism and Penal Populism in the Wake of the Stanford Sexual Assault Case’, Feminist Criminology, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 47–69.
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This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper SOCI306 with an expected word count of 3000 plus or minus 10% with a total of 3155 words. There are 34 references used for this essay.

A woman comes home from work, there is still a few hours in the day before she needs to rest for the next day. She is financially strained from time to time and thinks she could really do with a couple extra dollars to make the weekly bills meet ends. She looks at her coat, she could go outside, and she could make money using sex as her service. Instead, she looks at her computer desk. She goes on and spends the next 3 minutes rigging her virtual reality system up. She loads into a virtual world in her very own customized avatar, she visits a virtual club whose hours are open. People are working the virtual poles, others taking people to rooms for sexual exchanges. This girl pulls someone from the crowd, they make a transaction. Sex for money, in this virtual world. All anonymity, no in person interaction, they are both there for one thing, in this simulated world made to be perfect. She has both domains of sex work, real and virtual. Each with their own benefits and their own risks. When she and her client is done, she removes her equipment, still at home. No awkward business to take care of, and no mandatory check-ups common of a physical sexual performance.
While this story is fictional, it is something that is happening in the lives of very few people in the world today. Sex workers without boundaries of the real world, they have chosen different pastures of opportunity, they are pioneers of a future of sex work yet to be fully appreciated and realised.

The Public on Sex Work

Publicly sex work has been a social issue that has been long painted as a criminalised and or immoral activity. There is deliberation as to whether it ought to be legal due to it spawning because of gender/sex social inequality or due to majority agreed upon cultural and religious beliefs (Skilbrei 2019). The problem is a lot of the public opinions and ideas pushed with respect to sex work is ever closely influenced by the penultimate patriarchal society that has influenced sex work topics. It is usually not sex workers that are involved in the conversation of having sex work better, legal, or safe (Pajnik & Radačić 2020). It is the will of men that for a long time has been the mechanism by which the public opinion is formed, where women are demonised and reduced to what the male policy maker believes is best.
Only in recent times has society seen shifts in progressive countries, but these shifts still face one issue. The progressive shift comes from a patriarchal public sphere and whether it considers sex work permissible, fair, and liberal or alternative bad, unequal, and damaging to women, it will always be exclusionary to some women’s perspectives. Holistically, there is no absolute answer or agreement as feminist perspectives split apart, and all the meanwhile patriarchal society continues to consume as males thrash women’s rights, attack women in sex work, objectify and weaken individuality in society (Shrage 2016).
Another aspect of the public opinion of sex work is hyper-fixated on the public health concerns that sex work brings to a society. Sex work has been particularly targets in the prevalence of STIs (Mc Grath-Lone et al. 2014). Sex work however when kept in criminal or invisible contexts also finds itself surrounded by illicit aspects of lifestyles such as drugs and substance abuse, which nowadays is especially important to public concerns especially in under-developed and criminalising countries (BELLIS et al. 2007).

Histories and Perspectives on Sex Work

In the real world, sex work has been a recognised as far back as 4000 B.C., typically known as a women’s work type in which one pays for her sexual services or hospitality usually of a sexual nature. Culturally the attitudes towards sex work varied, but as brothels and institutionalised prostitution in some settings grew, the world of sex work has become more recognised (Clarkson 1939). Key to the rise of prostitution, has been theorised by socialist feminists as being a consequence of both classist capitalist structures and male-dominated patriarchal society (Gerassi 2015). Sex work gets regarded as a non-qualifying form of work much like how other responsibilities oftentimes in patriarchal society are asserted upon women like housekeeping except that instead sex work is paid for and necessary in some cases for survival (Berg 2014). Ergo, it is the basis of the patriarchy as well as the circumstance of capitalism in an ethos, which dictates the success and extent that sex work functions. Hence why, women widely dominate the sex industry. It is an option that opportunistic women can use for financial gain that is resultant of forces that downtrodden women (Shrage 1994). Co-existing to this, are radical feminists which typically infer that sex work is harmful to women, as its presence and purpose strictly reinforces the power disparities between men and women, with women having to retreat to sex work domains as other options are not as available as they would be for a man (Thusi 2018).
Regardless, sex work has grounded itself in societies with the legality of which being very turbulent, workers in fact continue to do sex work despite its criminalisation even despite the increase of ill-health, violence, and other harms to them (McDermid et al. 2022). This is a problem that has been over-shadowed by the cultural panic that sex work is immoral or parasitic (McClanahan and Settell). But inversely to the radical and socialist perspectives, there are liberal feminists. Liberal feminists regarding sex work claim that women have the right to do it, and it is an individual basis by which women choose to do it, but also have opportunity in other sectors and express safety and regulation in their sex work sectors. Its more about turning a patriarchal system, into a freeing system.

The Virtual World

Online spaces are vastly dominated by men which is due to the difficulties of acquisition technology to access the internet as well as attaining the literacy to utilise online space. Men are often pushed into the internet especially as the content therein is made for men, but women are often turned away from it due to imposed social responsibilities, internet hostility, and lack of anything drawing them to the space. In fact, this is the case for more minority groups. The internet requires privilege to access (Dixon et al. 2014).
A large pushing force for the internet’s popularity though, is the opportunity for globalisation of oneself and the anonymity that comes with being an online actor. To a sex worker, this is a crucially helpful tool. To have your identity kept secret and be able to branch out one’s services would provide an especially powerful tool that women of real-world sex work might not have. It must be stressed that while the internet is accessible by all, certain aspects, features, and privileges of the internet are coveted by many as it can precede the requirements of specific hardware and knowledge. Nonetheless, sex work had infiltrated online space a long time ago, typically in the form of roleplay services, fantasies, and what is referred to as “Cybersex” on adult chat room forums (Young). They have also found spaces in online marketplaces sometimes called “online brothels,” that allow the sex worker to reach clients more easily (Reynolds).
Another area of sex work though, is a step further than chatrooms and marketplaces. Programs that make real-world simulated environments provide a first-person immersive experience that is designed to create a sense of self-identity therein and become like if not better than the real world. These programs can come in a variety of forms, but some spaces like the titular VRChat utilises modern commercial equipment to fully appreciate and realise the extent the simulation of people and the world (VRChat Inc. n.d.)
Online sex work is a growing medium and hence complex. To approach this, there needs to be a clear distinction of Sex Workers, and Sex Creators. Sex creators have figured out means to simulate intimate bodily interactions including penetrative sexual activity, as well as provide tools for people to individually alter their bodies and remove clothing (Krell and Wettmann), they provide foundational systems that have sex work, work in virtual space. For sex workers, this is key to integrating their practices into the virtual space as it transcends previous methods of online sex work. The only thing holding sex workers back in these respects though, is the level of computer literacy and capacity to commission or create avatars capable of these intimate interactions, in addition to bypassing physical limitations and fully immersing oneself into the medium (Kim 2021). Hence being an enthusiast of the platform and a sex creator is very key to success.
Comparatively to physical sex work, there comes a variety of challenges that are involved in joining a virtual sex work system, but with it comes the introduction of benefits otherwise unavailable and downsides in other areas which are crucial to addressing online sex work (BlackFeminisms 2017).

Online Anonymity

It long has been the case that the internet is a playground of absolute freedom. People online are not directly attached to their bodies, or faces and as such, when someone is an online actor, there real-world self is involved with their real self. If someone can create an identity that adheres to performances of any kind of person, they will be interpreted as such, and in turn, sex workers can garner some confidentiality in their work but potentially also flexibility in who and what they can identify as (Taniguchi et al.).
Online anonymity is far from perfected however, such as in the case of a British virtual reality sex worker that goes by the alias “Hex.” She performs her services via VRChat, a program built for interaction between peoples in social contexts which allow for physical body-interaction and community building. But on a planned trip to see friends in the United States, Hex was turned away and sent home as she got to the United States because she was recognised as a sex worker, which was illegal (Cole 2023).
Radical feminists might suggest this is functionally a media tool for utilising “the male gaze” as users on the VR medium would potentially try to adhere to popular trends of attractiveness and femineity for better business (Ponterotto 2016). A proposition by Barroso (2022) suggests that in the modern day we live in both a physical and virtual world, and this virtual world harbours what is referred to as the “hyper reality” in which social ideas, symbols, and culture is hyper realised and simulated in the virtual world, as they refer to as “more real than real”. This might also be a strengthening facet of this “male gaze” issue especially given that the virtual world as a media form are a large part of cultural perceptions and identity as well to us an individuals and consumers of the online space.
Additionally, sexual activities can be used for impersonations of peoples or types of people. A major concern in modern day especially with respect to sex and pornography is deepfake technology (Franks & Waldman 2019), as far as anonymity is concerned, its worth wondering to the extent users will go. To impersonate other virtual sex workers, real people, or just deceive people as someone they are not using the VR medium to disguise and provide anonymity for their real selves, seems entirely tangible in a world of hyper realistic impersonations.

Detachment from Physical Interaction

In the real world, there exists risks that a sex worker must keep routinely track for their own safety and security. Such risks include unwanted pregnancies for women, possible sexually transmitted infections, violence from clients, scamming, stigmas, and work conditions (Phrasisombath et al.). Interestingly though, most of these risks in the real world are circumvented and give rise to alternative trends in treatment of sex workers, while virtual sex work avoids risks of infection, physical violence, and unwanted pregnancies it does not get away from everyday harassment and virtual sexual harassment that online sex workers can face. Additionally, there exists a trend of fear amongst sex workers desperate to keep their online activity anonymous and inability to properly report harassment to police, due to the nebulous nature of the online sphere (Campbell et al. 2018)
Virtual sex work also lends itself to another issue entirely, the public opinion of sex work largely is responsible for the isolation and privatizing of sex work, with workers hiding away and camouflaging their work as to not draw negative attention to an already controversial work domain. Although virtual sex work has not got a definitive answer for this and works in favour of the isolation of the worker (Ernst et al. 2021). Policy against sex work routinely echo the properties of either forcing sex workers into isolation heavy environments to encourage autonomy but criminalising networking and business management of sex workers. Alternatively, policies to stop sex work to disincentivise sex work as viable on a physical and mental level due to criminalization thereof (Armstrong 2021).
Virtual sex work as a result may seem like a worthy substitute for sex workers under these policies, as the risks of the online world may outweigh the real-world situation, but also, the online world is more anonymous and invisible so navigating these policies is more fluid. Social isolation is a genuine issue in the sex work community, its key to many of the mental complications and unhealthy habits often associated with sex work like drug use, intense loneliness, and an overall decrease in quality of, and satisfaction for life (Pinedo González, Palacios Picos & de la Iglesia Gutiérrez 2018). Virtual sex work is made to mimic the real world, it has little to offer to remedy this except another realm to do their sex work in.

The Shift to Online Sex Work Environments

A lot of sex work that is found in online space are encouraged in response to real-world events and circumstances that force people to innovate and experiment to make ends meet in otherwise precarious work. Sex work is no exception, and being a work force that is made up of majority women, moving into online sex work can seem to be a tremendous task. But as seen in the COVID-19 pandemic, sex workers saw great benefits and booms in their industry primarily in the form of digital media services and fulfilment of sexual requests live or as a product (Rubattu, Perdion & Brooks-Gordon 2023). In person sex work was significantly complicated by the pandemic, and sex workers were not considered to be “essential workers” so for full time sex workers, the shift very may well seem like the only direction to go when the physical sex industry goes stagnant.
With respect to the virtual reality sex workers though, it was not just workers shifting into online workspaces, people could not go outside and perform their typical daily routines during the pandemic. People looked for alternative activities, lifestyles, and mechanisms to navigate the pandemic time, and one of these was the adoption of virtual reality (Ball, Huang & Francis 2021). The adoption of VR early in the pandemic saw adoption in work sectors such as schooling (Buentello-Montoya, Lomelí-Plascencia & Medina-Herrera 2021) and in many other places such as military and medical responders (Xie et al. 2021). These adoptions both adhered to the idea of “working from home” while also allowing for a more human, and more physical interaction than just a flat screen and cameras. Although, VR work does not necessarily mean the work is effective as people in VR send to grow more anxious and less-productive with use (Aufegger, Elliott-Deflo & Nichols 2022). Regarding sex work, this might not necessarily be a problem as sex work is a very hyper-social work format, although it is very arguable that virtual reality sex work may remain a hyper-niche sector of sex work until further advancements is made on the medium (Ernst et al. 2021b).

Effects on Sex Workers

Regarding all these aspects of the virtual sex worker marketplace, societal forces ought to consider whether the online shifts versus the real-world sex world equivalent will clash. As discussed, sex work online is an incredibly ubiquitous sector from chatroom to simulations of the real. It has the potential to be a phenomenally successful market safer and more desirable by sex workers of all kinds, but countless issues arise in a medium without boundaries. Until virtual reality sex work becomes more realised these issues will remain in a niche sector of sex work.
From a liberalist point of view, it should not matter what women choose to do with sex work if their existence is appreciated by and protected by policy and regulations. Women using concurrent trends that rub off from the “male gaze” and more real than hyper realities should be respected. Although, the online sex workspace varies in barriers of entry, it does not seem out of pocket for people to utilise the online sphere to orchestrate sex work through impersonation and deception. With that said, there are few ways to “police” the internet with jurisdictions varying, as well as evidence and reporting on the internet being finite.
With respect to sex workers, they shift in droves to online spaces when their sex work is challenged and threatened by world events and law. It doesn’t seem at all fair to suggest women completely disregard the practice of real world sex work, but given the invisibility of sex work as a sort of “underground” work environment, if a online shift were to be incentive enough for sex works to drop real world sex work entirely we must ask whether this incentive is an accessible one for all sex workers, but also ask whether it reflects another trend of sex work consumerism moving onto the online space. From a Marxist point of few, there is inevitably going to be class-based exclusion in the online sex work sphere in that reality.

Conclusions

Sex work has been a seriously underappreciated societal matter, with its issues often misconstrued and twisted. Even with modern day movements such as feminism, sex work rockets ahead in innovation as modern technology and in turn opportunity arises. It is this constant advancement that further entrenches sex work in new issues and discoveries yet to be researched or addressed by sociological interest. Online, sex work is still writhe with crime, phenomenon, and risks, and still sex work thickens, especially in how it has come to attempt to bypass physical barriers of the online world, and simulate the work, and workplace of sex workers online. It is imperative, that researchers look to these spaces and their aspects to determine its worthwhileness and societal downsides, but additionally so, on a public level continued debate on the legitimacy and permissibility of sex work needs to be highlighted in its nuances and new-found reach.

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This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper ANTH327 with an expected word count of 1500 to 2000. There are 20 references used for this essay.

In various cultures and societies, people pick and choose based on varieties of factors and aspects of objects and their ascribable value. When we refer to value, especially in relation to money, a dollar can culminate into many dollars, and those dollars are exchangeable for goods and services, on a modern level definitionally core to this is the distinction that goods and services are a “currency” of various kinds that are tangible objects, and that money is an account of value ascribable and accounted towards things that is intangible (FX 101, 2023). I believe that in the abstract, raw pure materials and symbolic items like coins are valueless but definitionally they are just simple representatives for an account and value ascribed to exchanges and actions within a community. It is we combined with time that begets values and changes values but the ways in which these values coalesce tend to equally shift as economic development, foreign exchange, and affairs change. Currencies are used in relational exchanges, as is money, but its form and format has morphed into something that does away with more aged systems of exchange.
To become something of value according to Gregory (1997, pp.12-13) would be something that ‘invisibly applies relations to relations of people’ this invisibility being the human construction of that value and its ‘social, cultural, and relational reproduction of the value in a process and standard of value’. Bindewald (2021, pp.3-9) reinforced this, they described the meaning of money today as dependent on contexts and is otherwise ambiguous due to the complexities of different kinds of money and the value thereof from tangible to non-tangible digital currencies. Strictly speaking, though that isn’t to say all forms of currency, do not have a general innate value, it is best to query the meaning behind an object and the common communication means of trade. One might argue the intrinsic value items key to physiological function and survival have much like how food and clean water are coveted resources by many which are both finite, and symbolic in cultural mutualism in trade as a currency of sorts even where barriers of communication are obstructing, but common goals and relationships are physiologically coterminous and culture adjacent (LB, MEPE and GB, 2018, pp.1-8).
For instance, when W. Schulz (2012, pp.3-7) explains trade between individuals, the propensity to trade has common key principles in that each person has interests that could be symbiotically advantageous to work with, and there must be an established concept of value, property, and capacity to cooperate. Thereby a trade identity needs to be made of tradable goods, such as food which is required and desired for growth and development. As these relationships evolve and branch out, research by Hart (2015, pp.414) points out there exists a currency-based system of ‘shared meaning’ in items of symbolism, hierarchies, and form which is true also of modern money. Schulz thereby demonstrates a key tenant in how items gain value through relationships based on common understandings and principles of ownership and bartering. That’s to say, not all currencies conform to a uniform set of rules, no one value nor definition fits all, but there does exist a general set of common ideals relative to the relationships between our fellow man within respective cultures and societies, but also globally.

US Gold Symbolism, and its Redundancy

Not everyone will find purpose or significance of value in gold, but to understand how these otherwise benign objects attain their reputations as valuable objects, the origins by which these values need to be appreciated. As a popular example take gold, according to research by Schoenberger (2011, pp.3-24) gold has been a scarce but reoccurring thematic metal throughout history. Gold isn’t intrinsically valuable, but the key to its perceived value comes through its religious connotations, historical costs of life and the environmental damage during its strenuous desire to mine it, and most ‘especially its low stock in Western society that was growing but largely restricted to higher social powers’.
Symbolically gold has been used as far back as Greece, it was a common religious material that found use in ‘rituals to revere gods and idols’ but also used in ‘jewellery and romantic engagement’ insofar as to provide a ‘symbolic connection between individuals and god by gold use in these systems (Holland, 2005, pp.139-140). Gold by proxy of these classifications in importance becomes symbolic not only of relationships between individuals but personal connections to religious powers imbedded in these societies. A possible reason for these religious connotations and its use common use in gifting may be due to their physical properties. ‘Gold is a resistant and malleable metal’ that overcomes degrading elements (Fisher, 2018). Considering golden coinage, Coins of many varieties have existed for a long time, but coins of gold were of particular interest for this very reason because of their tangibility, and longevity according to McKay and Peters (2017, pp.61-63).
Once gold became a more public economic entity, however, a convenient solution came in the form of paper currency to hold an account for amounts of gold handled by banking units of authority with gold at a fixed price (Knafo, 2006, pp.81). This alongside many transition periods of culture shifted the perspectives of the value of money to other cultural aspects, especially after the dissolution of the gold standard which saw a . According to research by Lozza et al. (2022, pp.615), money has become symbolic on its own, socially it represents ‘power in its capacity to buy, freedom in that it allows for personal interests to flourish, security in independence, and love as it is usable to substitute for love and affection alone and as gifts’.
The titular paper money format widely used now functionally works around many multicultural and subcultural relationship bounds alongside its symbolisms. Money is given on the basis of contributions to society such as jobs and creation, said money crucially is used to make exchanges for resources key to living, but also resources of ‘luxury’. The transition from gold as status has shifted into materialism and wealth as status, as Goffman (1951, pp.294-304) describes,’ what people own, what others don’t own, what people wear, and what people engage in indicates power, wealth and status made possible by the acquisition of money’. These indicators exist functionally exist in social categories of restriction of attainment and standouts of social position/class. Say for instance bikers, according to Schouten and McAlexander (1995, pp.48-49) people such as bikers use the money to procure means into integrating into a common subcultural group of individuals and relationships. These means involve ‘tattoos, motorcycles, forms of clothing, and other possessions that represent that group and status within the group’.

Exchanging the Tevau

In contrast to the United States gold standard, there are other forms of currency such as the Santa Cruz Island Tevau. The Tevau is equally as valueless without its cultural and relational background, it’s a complex object of finer complexities in its properly realised purpose. As Maurer (2018, pp.1-18) describes, the value given is proportional to the cultural importance of its meaning. The Tevau takes effort and time to make, and its acquisition represents prestige and power, and while possible for trading, is not for trading but exchanges such as bride price.
It is also known as red feather currency because the Tevau is made of red feathers of birds; the key to the Tevau's importance is the size and state of degradation of the object, which are indicators of its value and significance (Met Museum, n.d.). The Tevau as Bonshek (2009, pp.74-92) purports is a currency used for exchanges as it would with money, it is symbolic in power and spirituality, as an offering in exchange though, for of bride prices are very important to the Tevau. In fact the Tevau core aspects of its meaning and ritualisms strengthen it; it carries traditionalisms and rulesets that reinforce way of being in those societies such as gender roles favouring male individualism and property ownership.
Culturally this is very relevant when describing the Tevau currency as one of relationship value. Historically bride prices can be seen across many varieties of cultures but are not mutually exclusive with the use of the Tevau in exchanges. Bride prices include various forms of exchangeable items values such as livestock, and as a practice function (Nyyssölä, 2022). The purpose of these prices though is not necessarily to ‘buy’ a wife but instead culturally symbolic of an individual's love and desire of that wife, and the exchanged goods being a mode of marital recognition and commitment that functions to honour the sacrament of two individuals. Thereby symbolically Tevau as well as other resource retains the values for the customary cultural practice utilising the Tevau which give it a desirable value to its people.
Many of these structures that are reinforced and supported by the Tevau system though have crumbled since the introduction of money to these societies dubbed “the great transformation”. Once colonialism set in, Maurer (2006) describes the necessity of other culture's money became more prevalent outright shifting the value of currencies of specificity across many societies. Cultures affected were shook, and their relational systems and structures of the not just limited to Santa Cruz cultures were significantly altered. The Tevau for instance was put under challenge in the bride price system as women were given new accesses to wage earning and individualism which in turn tarnished the traditionality’s that currencies like the Tevau upheld as researched by Macintyre (2011, pp.106-113).

Conclusion

Anthropologically, money is a ubiquitous term and an often-confused neighbour to the currency system. Money and currency are empty without symbolism, but people and culture are what thrive and build up and off symbolism, these symbolisms are doubly key to relational backgrounds and exchanges between peoples. These systems form however by a predisposition in that people will make exchanges. From bride prices to development, and belonging it is people that ascribe meaning in relation to themselves and their peers, and with new changes, innovation, and intervention the meanings of these symbolisms equally shift and more. Because of this, it is imperative to fully appreciate especially how that currency system of exchange across cultures can entirely revisualize traditionalities and customs built on relational backgrounds, as well as entirely change how people perceive personal and interpersonal relationships with money, currency, and culture. Value comes, it degrades, people and worlds change and then some.

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Bibliography

Bindewald, L. (2021). Inconsistent Definitions of Money and Currency in Financial Legislation as a Threat to Innovation and Sustainability. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 14(2), p.55. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/jrfm14020055.
Bonshek, E. (2009). A personal narrative of particular things:Tevau(feather money) from Santa Cruz, Solomon Islands. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 20(1), pp.74–92. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1757-6547.2009.00004.x.
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This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper ANTH327 with an expected word count of 1500 to 2000. There are 21 references used for this essay.

In a capitalist society, everyday people are fundamentally required to attain money to acquire a home, survival resources, utilities, and luxury items. Money is a constantly looming aspect of life that is regularly under threat by economic shifts and social position. Most importantly, the effects of money on lives are most clearly visible in class differences.
Money-adjacent motivations that have agitated money as a motivator include minority disparity. Historically in many countries, politically motivated discrimination geared against ethnic groups and gender roles has key influences on the opportunities available for relevant identities. Minorities especially racial minorities in the United States have faced employment, health, educational, financial, and legal disadvantages (Mineo, 2021). These minorities are compromised in their options and are more predisposed to criminal responsibilities to make ends meet. Money is one of the fronting forces needed for social reproduction, when someone is surrounded by poor options will more likely choose poor options.
One final factor that influences money motivation is the offender's motive. Lower socio-economic conditions that reflect one's wealth can motivate criminal offence as an outburst reminiscent of possible irrationality, emotionalism and impulsivity. Offenders additionally have to both estimate the societal effect of crime, as well as calculate the worthwhileness to risk of legal punishment ratio according to research by Peng et al. (2022).

Women In Crime

In the article “Female Smugglers on the Block” by Campbell, (2008) they discuss drug-lord stories about women's hierarchies in drug crime and social phenomena therein. Women socially are a unique case study in crime due to their socially projected ideas of purity, fragility, and femininity. Their development vastly differs from men in cultural contexts, and biological differences are pertinent in differences in work (Quinn, 1977, pp.186-187), but patriarchal social constructions of female subservience have only recently in some places seen women given more personal liberty and progression towards equality in aspects such as pay (Dixon, 2011).
Amidst feminist motive for women’s empowerment, dichotomous border relationships of differential cultures play economic and interpersonal roles as sources of both income and female empowerment. Women in the drug trade between the US and Mexican border are especially present in this exchange (Campbell, 2008, pp.243). Women have cultural advantages judicially and socially comparatively to men, that are directly tied to perceived gender roles and societal purpose (Geppert, 2022). Women in the drug trade can use different cultural performances of gender as a manipulation mechanism for success, and based on the jurisdiction in which they stand it is malleable.
Patriarchal-adjacent systems persist, as the hierarchy of criminal organizations tends to bolster women to power who are already involved with high-ranking members with options of taking over when their partner passes (Campbell, 2008, pp.251). otherwise, women tend to hit “glass ceilings” that long women’s struggles have hindered career progress and financial power. These glass ceilings however may differ between cultures between the Mexico and United States border (Campbell, 2008, pp.256).
Women don’t just commit crimes because “they can” but it also might be a resort that “they ought to”. Cultural systems that don’t satisfy women’s life needs including those of motherly responsibility (Davies, 2002) and partner compromise (2008, pp.256-258), may see women as more victimized criminals that use crime to substitute shortcomings and use criminal relationships as a “kind of gendered economic strategy”. Alternatively, women of more materialism may view their empowerment and growing status as a means to attain equality in that they can do as a man does (Campbell, 2008, pp.242).

‘I had always sold. It’s not money you can live off, but it helps. After I had kids, I just wanted the best for them. Was pure struggling…. Not like their dad was providing, he’s a pure loser man. My oldest brother. he was a drug dealer. I learned from him … My brother had contacts… and hooked me up…. That’s how I got into this. My siblings saw me doing well, because I would be like buying them stuff, and they were like “Thanks sis, by the way, how’d you get the money for that”. With the more success I had I just brought them into the fold.’ – Karen - (Holligan and Mclean, 2019)

“By hanging around my brother and Jimmy, drug dealing, it was just something that came naturally to me. I wasn’t in tune with what I was doing. I think that gave me a little edge where it made me fearless. Jimmy was going to court after being caught and had an order come in and had to move 10 kilos of cocaine and I got scared, I didn’t want him to get in trouble. So, I offered to do it and drove coke from A to B. I wanted Jimmy to know I’d help him get through hard times.” – Paraphrased from Vice TV, (2022, 0:20 - 0:50, 2:35 - 3:15)

Offending in Homeless Youth

Furthermore, research by Gaetz and O’Grady (2002) regarding homeless populations share findings relevant to disproportionate criminal leanings in disenfranchised youth. But why? Major economic shifts in Canada in response to globalisation and changes in social funding plans saw a rise in homeless youth. The homeless youth tread the lines of economic struggle. Inverse to the economic mainstream, homeless folk are subjected to higher rates of substance use and abuse, as well as mental and physical atrophy that functionally cripples their ability to work and find stability (Sleet and Francescutti, 2021). Black and indigenous people make up a large rate of homeless and are a product of historical injustices and residual colonialist harm which can be seen across many countries. Continued underrepresentation in policy decision-making often hampers generational wealth and worsens poverty access to black and indigenous communities of the USA for instance (Willison et al., 2023).
But if the homeless can’t get money for food, warmth, and shelter why don’t they get work? The disadvantages of homelessness do not reflect an unwillingness to work but a lack of opportunity (Gaetz and O’Grady, 2002, pp.448). The informal economy is an impromptu remedy to this inopportunity that provides a low-skilled modicum of income, as its barrier for entry pales in comparison to the formal economy (Karabanow et al., 2010, pp.43). The informal economy comprises untaxed work forms some of which are considered illegitimate and directly tied to homeless associations such as squeegeeing, panhandling, sex work (depending on jurisdiction), and criminal trades like drug dealing (Homelesshub, n.d.)

“Money, ultimately. I didn’t plan to be a sugar baby, I had been doing cam shows since I was 16, by advertising on Craigslist. It took years to find clients who were serious about spending large amounts of cash on me. I have no choice. Without sex work, I would be poor. The men have such financial power over us, so we can turn down the money, but it’s really hard not to.” – Lotte (Hanson, 2018)

Research by Stewart and Hurren, (2017) suggests that homeless youth are additionally a product of dysfunctional, and disadvantaged families. Employment is harder to obtain due to their compromised social position which exacerbates drug use, mental unwellness, and health. They struggle to get core necessities for living because their employability and living conditions are visible and undesirable. Thus in the absence of money, they are more likely to commit crimes as strategies for survival than housed youth.
It is these disadvantages and perceptions that further downtrodden these homeless youth and encourage offending behaviour as a “last resort”. According to Johari et al. (2022), social stigmas and harassment are major problems that fuel this issue. Their appearance, experiences, poor health, and more as a result of their homelessness and lack of money to apply to themselves are used against them. They’re victimized because of their disadvantages which opens them up to further social indecencies and alienation which serve to only further their dissociation with society, and thus further criminal inclination. 

Social Networks and Theft

In the anthological works of Newell, (2006) theme of stigma continues to flourish. In the world of moral economy, social relationships work as proxies for gain and losses concerning capitalism and theft. Theft as a criminal act is interpreted relative to who it is committed against, it is social lines that part these perceptions, to steal from an outsider becomes a supported achievement, especially in immigrants. Consider (Newell, 2006, pp.180-181).
“Our elected officials in Washington don't get it. Illegal immigrants have broken the law, and let's not forget the people who hired them. Those employers paid the immigrants below the minimum wage. That's against the law, and they should be heavily fined. I came to this country legally by applying and waiting for my background to be checked… What's wrong with these illegals not doing the same?” – Last Word, Virginia Gazette (Sohoni and Sohoni, 2014, pp.49)
Within urban capitalist environments, money becomes the epicentre of individuality and expression by which to identify through the exchange of money for items of cultural value. Complementary to this core of money is the stratification of particular groups into specific environmental sectors that reflect the social inequality in communal material expression (Föllmer, 2019, pp.322-324). Following social disorganization theory as described by Mckay and Shaw (2010 pp.828-829) high deviancy in specific environments co-occurs alongside socio-economic disadvantages in these communities such as poor housing, poverty, and residential instability. To overcome challenges is a survival instinct thus indicating some crime is a complex reaction to circumstance that is seldom one-dimensional.

Conclusion

In closing, money as a motivating factor for criminality is deeply complicated by the co-existence and production of social phenomena. Cultural divides between countries and locales therein reflect circumstantial and relevant social afflictions that hamper the development of predominantly disadvantaged and minority individuals. Capitalistically, nigh all commodities available including core necessities that are needed for survival are monetarily valued, but not everyone has access to a sufficient methodology that provides enough money to attain them. Crime and the informal economy use this problem as a proxy, wherein people in these complex and difficult life conditions have it as an opportunity where formal opportunity is out of reach. Thus, while not all individuals become victims of crime who commit crime, the reasons for why they might or do, stretch far into history and social stigmas that act only as deterrents for an issue that manifests in its communities and finds solutions in the informal economy and alternative cultural worlds.

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Campbell, H. (2008). Female Drug Smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Gender, Crime, and Empowerment. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(1), pp.233–267. doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2008.0004.
Davies, P. (2002). Women and Crime: doing it for the kids? Criminal Justice Matters, [online] 50(1), pp.28–29. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/09627250208553416.
Dixon, V.K. (2011). Western Feminism in a Global Perspective. Inquiries Journal, [online] 3(02). Available at: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/395/western-feminism-in-a-global-perspective.
Föllmer, M. (2019). The sociology of individuality and the history of urban society. Urban History, 47(2), pp.311–326. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s0963926819000877.
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Geppert, K. (2022). Explaining the Gender Gap in the Criminal Justice System: How Family-Based Gender Roles Shape Perceptions of Defendants in Criminal Court. Inquiries Journal, [online] 14(02). Available at: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1936/explaining-the-gender-gap-in-the-criminal-justice-system-how-family-based-gender-roles-shape-perceptions-of-defendants-in-criminal-court.
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This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper SOCI312 with an expected word count 2500 plus or minus 10% (2495 total). A total of 27 references were used.

Part of the evolutionary system of humanism and civilizational development hinges on the growth and development of our close technologies. It is these technologies that change us, and enhance our ability to practice goodness and nefariousness. In the digital world, data is one of the most valuable and powerful tools anyone can hold onto, there is a saying however, “that no one accesses the internet, the internet accesses you”. That’s to say, all you give directly won’t ever amount to the data you give indirectly, from the things you buy, browse, discuss, and do online.
People have willingly sacrificed privacy and in other sectors security in exchange for the convenience and or necessity of technological access. There is no perfect security. In the midst of technological and social shifts, criminality saw potential. The digital world opens a new world of criminal undertaking. But, data crimes aren’t always crimes, data is a gateway and introductory mechanism. Crimes such as rampant harassment, threats, sabotage and more can flourish from data. Data is as much a weapon as a judiciary or business tool and the extent to which it goes only grows with further technological enhancement.

The History of Personal Data and Its Evolution

Criminally speaking data theft didn’t have a means to existence prior to the widespread adoption of computers and the internet, primarily because data isn’t so conveniently packed in interpretable singular lines of extracted hashes and codes until the last few decades. The website Spamlaws, (n.d.) suggests some forms of data theft relevant to identity theft crimes likely were done through a mode of literal theft of relevant documents and dumpster diving. The downsides were primarily that face-to-face interactions may have been compromising. But even aside from general data theft, data collection according to a popular enough individual is seen in the growth industry of paparazzi that stalk and scavenge for information for their celebrity exposes only bolstered as the digital medium grows (O'neil, 2000).
Data has been a staple for management operations in institutions and forums such as government entities and banks. Physical documents of data and copies thereof are made to pertain to individual accounts and authenticity. New Zealand still today for instance uses physical documentation alongside online counterparts with strict guidelines on handling and management of that data which includes many varieties of data formats (Archives New Zealand, 2022). Data used to be a separate entity from individuals as a descriptor and record of ownership, responsibility, and census, but Ryan Garner (2018) describes that the means and purpose of data have instead become an integrated part of our everyday experience. People have become “hyperconnected” to their data to the point that data itself is a predictor and absolutist denominator and potential manipulator, like a diary written about you, but indirectly by you. It is no longer a picture, identification numbers, and bank numbers, data has been changing to something akin to an unwritten personal diary.
Nowadays online data is nigh impossible to avoid in the modern world. On the internet, practically everything is salvageable as data. Some you introduce publicly others indirectly in the latest corporate and social practice of internet data surveillance orchestrated by entities referred to as “big data” (Buscariolli, 2023). Data is definable as any form of interpretable string of text or set of variables, that describe and outline important denominations, personal legal connections, items information thereof, and personal information. Simpler formats of data include credit card information, passwords, emails, and the like. Sophisticated formats of data cover patterned behaviours and often exist in two formats of offline and online data, each orchestrated by contrasting methods of data collection.
Data is algorithmically synthesized by engagement and offline recognition survey systems. These are generally formed out of profit motive for service, hence why social media like Meta, Twitter (X), Youtube, and others have become epicentres for monitoring and online data harvesting users. But data harvesting has become not just for monetary purposes of the media site, but also a mechanism to tangentially shift websites into more secure and responsible entities of social organization at the bequest of criminal justice interests (Brown, 2014). Lavorgna and Ugwudike’s (2021) work describes a datafication revolution that reflects this practice, in that law enforcement has started to collaborate to use these data systems for the betterment of risk predictions and improvements to the capacities of law enforcement.
Conversely, offline data harvesting is more personal and proximal, in an article by Kostka, Steinacker and Meckel, (2021) they discuss the immense power of growing facial recognition technology that is causing reconsideration in the invasiveness of the CCTV surveillance program. It’s a siphon of information that is underappreciated by the public as an informational tool for those who wield it.
The relevance of data online however is multi-faceted, data can be a smoke signal of maliciousness that opens doors for criminals to take advantage of in “the stolen data marketplace” in more ways than one from fraud, theft, and sabotage (Hutchings and Holt, 2015). It is worth recognizing though, that while data is a gateway for many different criminal acts, the role and ethicality of data collection is also a relevant social concern that skates the knife edge of acceptability that is otherwise accepted as a part of life and underestimated in its power.

Struggling with Data Security: Backdoor Vulnerability

Digital users often consider data harvesting as a matter of fact whilst presuming a moralistic point of view that their data is secure and private. As technology grows, unfortunately, data is not so simple. It is crucial if the criminal justice system wants data, it must be obtainable and interpretable. Some jurisdictions focus on in-built computer back doors that allow for ease of access for authorities as well as highly sophisticated data structures that help assist said authorities. The National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States (USA) is an institution that does this. The NSA prides itself on their objective to lead the USA’s security and computer network operations to neutralise local threats, support military systems, and utilise new technology as arbiters of advantageous intelligence (National Security Agency, n.d.).
Contrary to this otherwise noble goal, the NSA is a heavily scrutinized entity due to the ethical concerns it brings unto itself. In 2013, an NSA consultant by the name of Edward Snowden took to leaking classified documents belonging to the NSA whilst immediately fleeing the country due to their imminent recognition of treasonous action. Said documents revealed disturbed revelations relevant to the privacy, and autonomy of people who are subjected to the surveillance practices of the NSA privy only to otherwise privileged masters (Pujol, 2020).
In the NSA’s furthered interest in security and protecting citizens, these back-door exploits work as virtual skeleton keys to individual’s personal systems. These come with drawbacks as not only are they perceived as a concern of interest to the general public, but these introduce vulnerabilities made for specific people, which can discovered and alternatively maliciously used (Linder, 2021).
NSA backdoors are supposedly designed only for use by NSA agents and other authorities, but this is not always the case as seen in the 2017 Wannacry Ransomware attack that threatened data under ransom (Prevezianou, 2021). A group called “The Shadow Brokers” leaked NSA secrets of exploits. Wannacry used two NSA exploits DoublePulsar and EternalBlue from this leak which allows auto launching and spreading of the ransomware. This made for a devastating domino effect that hijacked machines (Akbanov, Vassilakis and Logothetis, 2019) ranging from personal, business, and institutional, including especially the national health service (Ghafur and Kristensen, 2019). The NSA tools designed to assist with criminal justice were weaponised, and despite the privacy implications from those exploits even being there for the NSA to use, data becomes a core component of how crimes like wannacry work.
Wannacry did not have to be ransomware and could've been much more in the world of data breaches. Much to the dismay of vulnerable parties, it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for a data breach to compromise privacy and personal lives. Look no further than the titular "Fappening" of 2014 where hackers extracted and posted sexually explicit videos and images of celebrities (BBC, 2016). Not only was it considered a women's violation and misogyny, but it was also a nightmare for women affected that cannot go unnoticed, yet disguised in internet satire and heterosexism (Moloney and Love, 2017). In anticipation, considering backdoors and their weaknesses, another "Fappening" may loom in the future.

The Power of Data, its Collection, and Its Breaches

According to Madden (2014), research looking into public perspectives found that well over 70% of respondents believe data including false data is hard to scrub, and also carry concern that their data privacy is out of their control and subject to unsolicited access from institutional parties. People are generally in favour of more regulation and acknowledge genuine discomfort in their data security and distrust with the way data is collected and used.
With new technology, according to Wall (2018), Big Data is a tool for “Big Crime”. Big data collects user data consistently and stores it typically in cloud storage. Tech savvy Criminals have demonstrated many times the extent of damage committed with a data breach in the cloud exposing and using the data of millions of users compromised to commit myriads of crimes such as fraud, scams, harassment, cyberterrorism, and more.
Data breaches don’t just happen however because criminals “will” it. The extent and capacities of current technology is the easiest answer. Computers and the internet are public and connect everybody to networks that allow instant communication and sharing of data. This also requires security measures to prevent interception of that data, but also measures to allow CJS to access data that may be malicious or illegal, therein lies the problem. Nothing is impenetrable, to use these systems means to willingly agree to terms of security that are potentially erodible, but no security is absolutely safe. The reality is everything has “backdoors’ that bypass security, and security itself is equally part of that equation.
Data breaches today are fossilised in records. Some breaches are as relevant today as they were when the breach happened. The website HaveIBeenPwned (Hunt, n.d.) records breaches and checks for vulnerabilities relative to email addresses. The largest breaches rack up to half a billion in compromised accounts with a total breach allotment as of reading 12.6 billion “pwned” accounts to date across 700 websites. But not everyone is aware of how, and where they’ve been breached. In fact, breaches take time to notice and fix, it takes even more time to evaluate the severity of that breach with respect to various data variables.

The New Witch Trials of the Digital Era: Doxing and Gamergate

In the social context of the internet, personal data is a resource that once departed with becomes accessible by internet users in a relationship of “You don’t access the internet, the internet accesses you”. Even rudimentary data easily found by the average user has legitimate power in vigilantism and harassment, to reveal the identity and history, to impose a sort of exposure for justice or injustice. This practice is called doxing (Douglas, 2016). According to the site for Kaspersky, (2021) doxing isn’t generally considered a crime of its own, it is considered a methodology for harassment, cyberbullying, and social harm which can be categorically referred to as hate and harassment crimes, especially considering dox content requires it to be present by an individual’s presence.
Doxing as an internet phenomenon is one that spawns out of disagreement and distaste for another person(s) and its capacity to commit what Anderson and Wood (2022) refer to as virtualised violence cannot be understated. Doxing opens people up to not just the harms of harassment in data, but due to the subjectivity of how harms affect different people's lives after the individual has already been harmed initially. But because of the accessibility of public data, individuals including adolescents in a margin of 1 out of 10 have doxed with similar motivations in interpersonal disputes as researched by Chen, Cheung and Chan (2019).
In the case study of GamerGate, the internet saw droves of individuals taking to a widespread movement under the guise of being in favour of “Ethics in Game Journalism”. These games as a result of allegations that a game developer, namely Zoe Quinn engaged in sexual favours for reviews that improved their critic rating for their game, which at face value was enough to convince large numbers of gamers that games journalism and games themselves were under attack by “social justice”. In actuality, however, the Gamergate community were just argumentative and hateful internet users who saw fit to police women’s sexual behaviours and thrash feminist, liberal, and progressive conversation on video games (Lewis, 2015).
The motivations that fueled this movement saw many creators and thinkers alike being both harassed but also relentlessly doxed so that they were more publicly exposed for more harassment. Zoe Quinn was far from the only target of GamerGate, but she outlined serious personal mental hardship, and constant instances of her data being used to track and deface her, threaten her with rape and death threats, insofar as she had to regularly move and micromanage individual cases of career sabotage (Allegra, 2017).
Internet spaces as Bianna Wu (2015) a victim of the Gamergate dox,and harassment campaign described Gamergate as an ideologically motivated movement directly in opposition to women's rights. The internet itself manifests hate in community forums like Reddit and drives wedges to make the internet, an already unsafe place for women even more abusive. A stark contrast to the intended uses of the internet as a meeting and conversational space to socialise and express.

Conclusion

The technology of the digital world and the internet has been a colossally advantageous part of human development and interconnectedness, but it cannot come without faults at the core of both its user base and use purposes. Socially data has become more condensed and accessible on machines, and identities of internet users are becoming virtually tangible resources for ascertaining identity and personhood insomuch as providing a powerful tool for businesses and more importantly, law enforcement to effectively apply themselves to a constant growing and regularly morphing medium of internet traffic by using data for digital surveillance. It is however inevitable, that data is far from being perfectly secure in good hands, backdoors made by major criminal justice entities such as the NSA and spontaneous breaches that extract data from exploits and more make our data only a matter of time from being brought into exposure. Digital data crimes are not always outright crimes, but regardless of criminality data is a major tool for ill-intent and vigilantism that cannot be underappreciated by the public. It is the responsibility of law enforcement, businesses, and users to handle data with responsibility and dignity. A data expose’ after all is not how harassment, threats, sabotage, and other crimes work, it’s how they begin.

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Bibliography

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This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper GEND310 with an expected word count of 2500 plus or minus 10% with a total of ~2447 words. There are 14 references used for this essay.

Gender is an incredibly flexible and multifaceted form of representation and identity category of people in the modern-day. Historically, there has been a consistent dichotomy in expectations and depictions of individuals' sexes not to be confused with gender, which fit particular social and biological roles in life. There were men often as the protectors, breadwinners, and family heads. Then there are women who are carers, homemakers, controlled, pure, and mothers. These roles were pushed onto people of their respective genders, and it came to shape how society would act and perceive the genders and doubly so how the developing media perceived them and treated them. This ultimately extends to how deviance and criminal activity are viewed based on the gender of the person affected and doing the act. This analysis aims to critically assess and discuss how representations of individuals in intimate partner violence-related crime are gendered.

According to the New Zealand Family Violence Clearinghouse, Intimate partner violence (IPV) is defined as a criminal activity that encompasses all acts between two individuals in an intimate relationship that involves committing violence against one of the partners by the other. Most know intimate partner violence involves hitting, forced sexual advancements, and verbal and emotional abuses, which have also been known to have long-lasting emotional and socially defining effects on the survivor. Statistically speaking, women fall victim to IPV more than their male counterparts (New Zealand Family Violence Clearinghouse n.d.). Now where IPV is an outright criminal act, an additional layer to the effects of IPV precedes the act: the survivor's reporting and the response from social groups and the media itself.

Regarding some media backgrounds and media consumption, it has been found that media is less concerned about informing the consumer of the news but instead entertaining. This media phenomenon is dubbed "infotainment", a merging of information and entertainment, but more often is construed with misinformation, especially in the sensationalizing and editorial work of media and gender criminal interpretations. Violence towards women in and out of IPV is realistically ignored and instead conflated so as not to take their situation seriously because the intention is to entertain more than it is to inform as it stands as people want to be entertained; it just so happens this kind of content sells (Buckingham, J.I. 2004). This is true worldwide; in fact, news media ought to report on atrocities and terrible acts because people in society are interested and pulled in by news of a negative nature. According to a cross-national study by (Soroka, Fournier & Nir 2019 they found a detectable higher level of arousal in study participants to negatively toned media stories with lesser levels to positively toned media stories. People want to be entertained and are being entertained daily by the media in more than just cases of IPV, but they might not necessarily be aware of the underlying issues or even sensitive to them because of the saturation of media reporting cases in the way they do. Thus, this gendered criminal presentation issue may be as much a social problem as it is media. Nevertheless, it could be argued that this is the doing and purpose of some media organizations. Media in society has serious influential power and potential in shaping the perceptions of political policy and case by case social problems that need addressing, such as IPV. As such media can be used to set agendas and even potentially form policy across the policy cycle stages (Fawzi 2017). Something that might be worth exploring, therefore, is whether the purpose of reported crimes of IPV may not only benefit the media but indirectly reinforce ingrained agendas because of gender biases and stereotypes which go on to influence political agendas only to further the intensity in how these crimes are perceived and strengthen pre-existing ideas about IPV in both victimization and typical offenders.

In an article by Smith, Bond & Jeffries (2019), media in Oceania Queensland on reports on IPV tended towards sensationalizing their stories to catch the eye of viewers although at the expense of informing about the crime, thus improperly representing the reported case of IPV. There was little emphasis on the prevalence or societal context of the crime in the story nor mentions of services or information that can help those potentially afflicted by the same act. These discourses formulated unrealistic perceptions of IPV, taking away from addressing the criminal act. Interestingly, too, was the suggestion in some media articles for sympathizing with the perpetrator, predominantly men, which carries severe implications for male behaviour normalization because of a predetermined cause that justifies the man's actions and promotes patriarchal ideas. Given the strength of the media, this could potentially be inversely applied to avoid these harmful implications and formulation of gendered crime attitudes and work to support, but until then, gender crime such as IPV remains a mistreated and under-recognized issue in many media forums. Carlyle, Scarduzio & Slater (2014) explored female perpetrated domestic violence and found equally assumptive and strange perceptions put on perpetrators of IPV. Feminine attributes and stereotypes were projected onto female abusers but often framed the act as a woman protecting themselves from a perceived threat or just a woman acting out emotionally, excusing the violence of women relative to the idea of idealistic womanhood, similarly to the normalization of male violence as a "boys will be boys" dismissal by media in other media studies. Nevertheless, intrinsically there is a disparity between the treatment of victims and perpetrators of IPV built on the gender stereotypes surrounding and attributed to the individual. As a direct result of the media's constant insistence on IPV perception and gender, the sentiment is often reflected by the consumers of the media in broader society. Especially on internet media forums, users' responses aim to shame both the perpetrator of IPV and the survivor/victim of the act. As a result of media distrust and sceptical cultures combined with the enhancement of reports by the media itself, many victims are labelled as liars, and viewers mistreat the victims, some even blaming victims/survivors as being the provoking agent in the IPV incident because of stuff like their personal history, what they are wearing, or their alleged behaviour at the time. However, attention towards the survivor or victim is not dramatized as much if they are not an ideal victim for the media report (Whiting et al. 2019). These ideal victims quintessentially are defined by their readily available utility and usefulness in applying them to situations that affirm stereotypes. Thus, they have higher status and priority for media format than other victims had been ideal for writing a story. To be an ideal victim plays into the stereotypes of being generally a woman, weak, successful, blameless, and simply just attacked by an offender without any strings attached (Schwöbel-Patel 2018). So how does this all go for victims? Sivagurunathan et al. (2021) discuss systematic gendered biases against victims on one of the most popular media platforms, Reddit, in which male users would describe a common theme that shadows male IPV survivors in those shaming men, invalidating, or denouncing supportive systems based on scepticism. This hostility towards IPV survivors has severe implications for the well-being of survivors of IPV. Strangely, it acts as a second wave of abuses resulting from IPV that come from media sources they sought help from.

Respectively to a gendered lens, much of the conflation attributed to media cases on IPV draws on pre-established stereotypes that have persisted throughout much of civilization. Men, biologically, are built to have more muscle mass and historically have privileges over a woman in their accessibility to systems women cannot use, options in careers, hobbies, or family building, and typically are believed to have had a commanding say (Scarduzio et al. 2016). Though, many of these parts of the male perception result in a distorted and broken double standard by which they are treated socially and legally. Men that are in trouble for violent, highly assertive, or flippant attitudes are seen as "normal" as it is considered to be in their nature to take advantage of these things being in their gendered position of power. For women, however, this is depicted in media as a prevalent and active danger that threatens them, inferring that they need or ought to take measures according to gender norms not to draw attention to themselves lest they were to become a target. But this assertion is silly because this representation often puts the onus and blame on potential victims or survivors of these crimes to keep themselves from becoming a target by conforming to more conserved and safer terms instead of focusing on the offenders. Though it is not always enough, because of how women are treated in how they present themselves publicly, their history, especially sexually, and their demeanour in general, become a target for explaining the violence from a man. This applies just as well as it does in the streets as it does in an intimate relationship because potential offending men in cases of IPV take advantage of these opportunities even indirectly and resort to effectively coercing and intimidating their victims, and these harmful ideas will protect them (HLAVKA 2014).

In concurrent media, these troupes and means of dramatizing cases of IPV are present, but there has been some progress in how this media treats the context. For instance, in an article by the New Zealand Herald, a report of a drunken, blame-shifting, and adultering husband had attacked his wife after her mentioning intentions of splitting up. The article brings up important information regarding New Zealand's IPV prevalence and support lines for those in similar situations, but the article is written in interviewee style quotes from the survivor but portrayed as if it was a story. It goes from a traditional marriage with a child being between them to a fight that ended with the interjection of their daughter to a reflection of her marriage and realization of their subsequent abuses done to them which is not out of the realm of possibility, but its told to viewers almost to be fantasized for the guttural imagery to draw people in (Leask 2018). Among many other news sources, another case at the time of writing has been dramatically publicized by the Washington Post is an accusation of domestic violence during a court case on defamation between celebrities Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. This accusation came with the description of the Johnny Depp as the perpetrator, having courted them, making their former lover feel special only for later in the relationship to pick up drinking, drug use, start ridiculing them, became more violent, punching and throwing things because they liked "smashing up the place". This description of Johnny Depp was called "him letting the monster out" before only putting said monster away when they tried to rectify what they had allegedly done. On the flip side, Amber was depicted as a lonesome victim who would be understandably estranged and isolated if their claims were valid. However, this case has also extended as far as the accuser, Amber Heard, to be accused of intimate partner violence, who has since drawn the ire of people taking side with Johnny Depp, who has been chanting lewd remarks about Amber (Yahr & Andrews 2022). In one more report by AZCentral, a case of a woman perpetrated intimate partner violence occurs in an attempted murder of her husband. Her reasoning was straightforward as they put it; she suspected her husband had an affair, and his time spending time doing things he enjoyed was bothering her, and so she premediated an attempt on her husband's life as they slept. This article also quotes her insinuation as "this samurai wannabe crazy lady with hate in her heart", which contrasts the general depiction of a woman being pure, conserved and weak. Considering this, it is worth mentioning how that this status of crazy as opposed to the standard male label of criminal or abuser persecutes the woman's lack of traditional womanhood, separating the gender from the person as an abnormal woman. Additionally, in this article, there is no mention of broader societal contexts surrounding the criminal act of intimate partner violence, nor any referrals or mentions of systems that can help people in situations of intimate partner violence (Henderson 2018).

Out of these news articles, it's crucial to drawback to the excitability in how a paper is written and how excitabilities in writing draw from gender stereotypes. Notice how male perpetrators are often described very superficially, under their influence of alcoholic substances or drugs and having this personified monster contrasts who they are there typically. It buys into the burly stereotypes of manhood (Scarduzio et al. 2016) while lightly padding the act as there being an influencing factor (HLAVKA 2014). The third article, which is the only discussed case of female perpetrated violence, outlines an alternative theme of the women being less criminalized and more perceived as crazy as said in the article. This article parallels some of the findings of Carlyle, Scarduzio & Slater (2014), in which female IPV is seen as more acting out emotionally in this crazed state.

It is worth mentioning that different media forums approach IPV heavily varied. Some discuss the social contexts and provide referrals and links to services, while others are utterly devoid. They mostly only tell a story or act to allow the survivor to speak on the offence from their point of view. Yet this is still an issue that may be only solvable by socially addressing the media's gendered representations of IPV in a broader context. It is more about making media more informative, making people more understanding of the damaging nature of stereotypes and victimization and infinitely less about entertaining the masses in this disturbing pseudo-reality show of intimate partner violence stories. In conclusion, it can be stated that media representation of crimes and how those representations change relative to gender remains an essential topic in evaluating how society views each gender and how we approach intimate partner violence communally. Media tend to sensationalize cases of intimate partner violence to draw attention and effectively entertain readers, potentially brewing unrealistic perceptions of intimate partner violence and inappropriate addressing of essential contexts. This has wide-reaching impacts that publicly affect the abused and future cases and brew hostile environments for discussion of intimate partner violence. Importantly though, this sensationalization does not come without outliers. Some media outlets and their writers have addressed social contexts and helplines while giving survivors outlets to discuss and open up about their experiences, but this is far from solving the contemporary issues of gendered crimes manifested by a history of normalization by conflation.

Bibliography

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This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper SOCI202 with an expected word count 2500 plus or minus 10% (2655 total). A total of 17 references were used.

I grew up with a computer, but I also grew up with playgrounds, toys, and books. I’ve noticed as time has gone on, we have become immersed into a recent new network of civilization, but something about this curious existence I can’t help but feel becomes diluted and fractured compared to what I had. It was only a few years ago, that social media rooted itself into the zeitgeist and at the time the concerns of technologies influence upon people were merely postulating and sarcastic in the public eye. But how things have changed, how the digital realm has come to be so foundational in the development of our older lives and the still growing youth of the new generations.
I do not believe technology to be a stoppable force, nor do I believe it is a mechanism only for harm. Civilizations thrive on their technology, and it provides us with many luxuries necessary for prosperity. But currently, something is wrong, as our social media aren’t so much a place for connection and knowledge as a place to farm proverbial cattle on misinformation and influence. This untapped land of digital space is an entity orchestrated by corporate conglomerates of omnipresent systems that feed an over-consuming society, as well as influencers whose very words steer discourses built on the new internet-formed culture. Hyperreality is the new battleground, and it is a product of modernity that bureaucratizes humanity in data systems, manipulates people with more real than real facades of reality and advertising, and incitement a cultural reform of simulacra in which capacity is defined by literacy and compliance with a system that currently is a hostile actor. The digital world is expanding, and modernizing in a way that cannot be ignored at a profound rate, and it's eating at the heart of what is making us, us when it shouldn’t.

An Image of the 21st Century Late-Modernity

The prevalence of computers and the internet that many use can only be described by the profound capacity it gives to us resources, knowledge, and communication to an extent previously unfathomable by the public. Yet the internet has only room to grow and evolve and is still growing from humble beginnings in 1990 to the present year in numbers well over billions (Roser, 2018).
Physical libraries, meetings in person, and mail service by horse are becoming artifacts of the past and luxuries of history. Our phones and computers in conjunction with the internet have graced us with so much convenience of consumption that the way has reversed the coming generations in ways that spark concern over its erosion of human relationships and its negative health connotations. Ultimately if our new technological revolution does do humanity harm, how is it the new technology that accelerates our capacity to do and be both socially, institutionally, and creatively, equally acts as a harming agent of society? Modernity may have changed us, and the products and items of modernity as we digitize our lives have changed fundamentally how we behave and interact with the world around us (Hoehe and Thibaut, 2020). There even exists a genuine and probably just stigma against this technology as a proponent with the rise of artificial intelligence as a replacement for human labour in some sectors, whereas in reality, it ought to be an assisting agent which as of current is seemingly only privy to a select few individuals whose capacities thanks to AI turn those not in touch with the cutting edge of technology obsolete. (Lakhani, 2023).
The most concerning of these arenas, using the theories of Max Weber's disenchantment and iron cage of rationality, in conjunction with Baudrillardian hyper-reality, and Ritzerian McDonaldization in the digital medium is the prevalence of influence-based identity and social effect. One of the terms ponderable on the matter is “epistemic bubbles and echo chambers”. Cody Turner (2023) refers to the growth of online ideological communities of these chambers and bubbles of common and reinforced perspectives. Although distinguishing them between echo chambers deliberately “discredit” different perspectives from the quo of the communities, epistemic bubbles merely exclude data that may promote alternative thinking and perspective.

Theorist Perspectives on the Digital Issue

Robert Putnam (1995) in his work called “Bowling Alone” discusses a clear divide and intersectional complexity that describes outcomes of children relative to their access to technologies such as the internet. Part of the reason for this is the idea of social capital, which Putnam ascribes to a social network of norms, productivity, and opportunity. But due to the nature of growing neoliberalist sentiment of individualism and selfishness; mechanisms of mentorship and effective childrearing in the new technology world have both stunted social capital while simultaneously mutating bonds and the social environment. In contrast, then, people with that technology privilege may have more social capital as a consequence of slashing trust, well-being, and community. This has been studied by the likes of Alhumaid (2019) who demonstrates the costs of difference in technology accessibility both for users, and the use deprived. Although the costs such as social alienation and privilege could be ameliorated by enriching technology without compromising structures, such as in their study, the education system thereby “Harnessing hindrances and augmenting benefits” (Alhumaid 2019, p. 17).
The new landscape of community became the internet and the cultural divide Putnam outlines persists splitting the world in which we operate in, in twain. In this new digital space, Jean Baudrillard would agree with Putnam in that he believed that the online space irreversibly crashed how culture is practised in more ways than could be fully realized. The digital world to Baudrillard was a land of simulacra, meaning profiles of users that were finely crafted by individuals to represent them as their chauffeur of the internet as it were. It is these simulacra that allow interaction within the realms of hyperreality, which Baudrillard describes as “more real than real”. It is a simulation of the real that ultimately, he describes as rich in information but empty in meaning. Paradoxically, the hyperreal world is faker than the real world, for it is a more real world of real lies as described by Morris in Baudrillard's work (2020).
It is within this more real-than-real space that Max Weber would call to be one of the disenchantments of the world. By moving toward a technological reimagining of the world mankind has come to seek to fill a void through devices and substitutes which I believe the internet and computer today are exactly as that statement would purport. The disenchantment is a ubiquitous statement that refers to the ignorance of magic and mysticism that give meaning and a sense of wonder and discovery, one might argue the internet is only one of these mechanisms that have shattered that vision. The internet provides the answers to questions on a whim and options for interacting and spending time which compared to Weber’s original concerns of modernity takeover is an acceleration of the disenchantment process (Baum 1970). Max Weber (1991) believed in his chapter on bureaucracy, that there exists a hierarchy of officiality that micromanages systems of authority. Weber asserts such structures of bureaucracy have serious consequences that dehumanize and generate distance between what people do in the hierarchy versus personal perspective. Weberian perspectives refer to this as “the Iron Cage of Rationality”, a metaphorical reality in which controlling systems govern routine activity and control those underneath a system of iron cages. According to Chris Muellerleile and Susan L. Robertson (2018), Weberian concepts of bureaucratization already transcend and translate into digital reality as a more sophisticated holistic form of databasing and rationalization. The internet is a routine technology of consumption of media that sorts individuals into categorical pawns of variable control and engenderment relative to the influences and power of the spaces they routinely interact with. I believe that these iron cages have thereby moved from office and workspaces into a deeply interpersonal relationship with civilians in the social media that people engage with in the hyper-real world of simulacra. On the internet the iron cage is known as algorithms, a system surgically designed to capture audiences by promoting content to them by recorded data of what they consume, usually aligned with beliefs, purchase habits, and sub-cultures according to an explanation by the website QuickFrame (2024).
It is within this hyperreal space, where the iron cage algorithm rapidly expands, and the modernity that disenchants the magic of the world becomes suffocating. In an interview with George Ritzer, they outline the changing reality of his McDonaldization theory as digital algorithmic systems join the thoroughfare. He voices “The role of algorithms in choosing things for us involves a scary trend” in which he repeatedly refers to the problem of the immaterial digital world, and the reliance on non-human technologies that turn the McDonalization model into an entity of nothing and profoundly more dehumanized than the rational structures in the original McDonaldization model (Ritzer, Jandrić and Hayes, 2018) George Ritzer has tackled the topic of consumerist society on multiple different levels. Ritzer’s theory on McDonaldization describes how a consumer entity, such as McDonald's is a symbolic actor that manipulates the social commons. It does this through the Weberian idea of “Rationalization” as entities like McDonald's expand as a business and surgically inject themselves into the lives of people and “control what, how, and why consumers consume”. The technological boom into digital media proliferated McDonaldization in major businesses such as Amazon, which overproduces for a library of users who hyperconsume and push onto them things that attract more engagement with their business model. Amazon is more efficient and accessible, whereas McDonald's except for third parties like Uber-Eats, requires some amount of interaction and proximity (Ritzer and Miles, 2018).
According to Purwanti and Mas’ud (2019), there exists this “consumer society” in the post-industrial era for the new capitalist postmodern society. Consumer society refers to the value given to objects that culturally sign meaning but exist not as a commodity and seems to be majorly at the heart of these theoretical perspectives in technology. The simulation of reality is a consequence of our technological advancement that systematically trains users of Simulacra to conform to a process of code and value of media orchestrated by mass media. Through the simulation of reality, people thereby express themselves although falsely as members of the hyperreal that transforms humanity.

Solving and Embracing the Digitization of Thought

I feel, having seen this experience play out across films, various media, and in families including my own, enrapturement in the siren song of the internet and the digital world is crippling how we process information and have effectively branded opinions into a hyper-production machine of content consumption for the masses. Even in the presence of alleged awareness of the concerning state of technological affairs, there is little wriggle room to attempt to change or reassess what is now a grounded aspect of society. Often, I’m confronted on the internet, and its dregs that seep into real-world society the cultures for instance that circulate within the algorithm that is the iron cage. Ideology gets turned into a McDonaldized mechanism by which ideals and lives are sold to a populace. One of the most uncomfortable came to be the rise of the online manosphere which spawned involuntary celibate (Incel) culture, MGTOW (men going their own way) among other highly politically motivated and violent misogynistic epistemic bubbles and echo chambers that shape impressionist user’s beliefs and thought processes into extremism and rejectionism of legitimate contradiction to their beliefs (Perliger, Stevens & Leidig 2023).
The interconnectedness of various theorists’ understandings often finds themselves overlapping and complementing each other’s perspectives. Although a prescription for the problems is often discarded citing a regular pattern of inability to account for a consistently changing and unfathomable system of systems. Although some mobilizations have been undertaken to de-platform alleged socially damaging systems, some entirely and others partially, albeit as an alleged proxy for other political ideology and awkward populism such as in the banning of TikTok (Lutkevich 2023). As opposed to a singular answer, it might be more effective to apply a critical post-modernist perspective using Len Ulrich Beck’s theory of risk. As described by Bertilsson (1990) risk society refers to the phenomenon in which modernity and progressions of modernity conditionally have consequences that ought to be legitimized and recognized in a world where such risks cannot be immediately realized. As we immerse ourselves in new technology, we open ourselves vulnerable to their hazards and shortcomings such as the various technological disasters like the Chernobyl nuclear crisis. Instead of extreme risks of technology, the risks of technology influencing people must be considered a real hazard. Although Beck recognizes it is up to science and communication to appropriately apply a risk assessment lens to minimize risk, but science as a confronting force of intrigue and critique has weakened in influence to the plight of civilization. In the words of physicist Richard Feynmann “Doubting is a fundamental part of my soul. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I’m not sure of anything” (FFreeThinker 2010, 1:40 - 2:10). It is a part of the human experience to contemplate and assess risk, but it is that very risk that culls conversation surrounding it, and turns doubt into a misinformation weapon. Morris (2020) using Baudrillard's ideas refers to fake news as both a political tool and in a variety of circumstances an anti-science tool Baudrillard notes “We can no longer tell whether anything we hear about in media is true” referring to MMR vaccine autism conspiracy. What if then, the epistemic bubbles and echo chambers described by Cody Turner (2023), are products of the algorithm of content, ideas, and technology? The internet thereby neuters users relative to their background and interests by being more real than real. The question is how can we think critically if we as content consumers are stuck in the Ritzerian McDonaldization of the consumer packages we all receive algorithmically on our devices that tell us what to believe or how to think? In an awkward recount of Max Weber's iron cage of rationality, or Ritzer’s three cages, the internet and digital world pose I believe a morphological cage that builds around its habitants as they move; thus, the only escape is to outrun the restructuring of the cage as the internet rapidly changes for us, algorithmically and for all, structurally. Epistemologically it restrains thought and excludes those beyond its access or compartmentalization by the algorithm. In the eyes of Robert Putnam according to Bowling alone, once again this technological shift spells dreadful ramifications for how mentorship, privilege of access, and social ties as we become more immersed in this technological modernist world, are damaging.

Closing Statement

It’s a confusing reality to consider technology and the internet as sociological ouroboros because insofar as we rely on it due to how integral it is to the modernity of the world we live in, it is hard to separate ourselves from it. Most especially when at young ages, those with the privilege are indoctrinated into hyper-consumerism and introduced to a world of accelerated late-stage modernity. The technological world is more real than real, the McDonaldization of technology and the advertisements that reach us with technology, or how the internet has reshaped how we think and do into distorting how we perceive and consume information or misinformation. I feel as though people are already aware of this, albeit not in the hyper-theoretical sense, but feel the unease surrounding how it changed the social and modern arena. Solving the problem however requires a commitment to technology few can make, be it through risk society, or learning how to use it effectively without it overwriting us and how we do things. To remain critical and cautious, to not let ourselves become “more real than real”, is the ultimate challenge in the modern crossfire.

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Bibliography

Alhumaid, K 2019, ‘Four Ways Technology Has Negatively Changed Education’, Journal of Educational and Social Research, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 10–20.
Baum, G 1970, ‘Does The World Remain Disenchanted?’, Social Research, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 153–202, viewed 9 May 2024, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970010>.
Bertilsson, M 1990, ‘The role of science and knowledge in a risk society: comments and reflections on Beck’, in U Beck (ed.), Industrial Crisis Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 141–148, viewed 24 May 2024, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26162740>.
Chris Muellerleile & Susan L. Robertson 2018, ‘Digital Weberianism: Bureaucracy, Information, and the Techno-rationality of Neoliberal Capitalism’, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, p. 187.
FFreeThinker 2010, Great Minds: Richard Feynman - The Uncertainty Of Knowledge, YouTube, viewed 24 May 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkhBcLk_8f0>.
Hoehe, MR & Thibaut, F 2020, ‘Going digital: how technology use may influence human brains and behavior’, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 93–97, viewed 5 May 2024, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7366947/>.
Lakhani, K 2023, AI Won’t Replace Humans — but Humans with AI Will Replace Humans without AI, Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business Review, viewed 5 May 2024, https://hbr.org/2023/08/ai-wont-replace-humans-but-humans-with-ai-will-replace-humans-without-ai>.
Lutkevich, B 2023, TikTok bans explained: Everything you need to know, TechTarget, viewed 24 May 2024, https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/TikTok-bans-explained-Everything-you-need-to-know>.
Morris, J 2020, ‘Simulacra in the age of social media: Baudrillard as the prophet of fake news’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 319–336.
Perliger, A, Stevens, C & Leidig, E 2023, Mapping the Ideological Landscape of Extreme Misogyny, January, viewed 27 May 2024, https://www.icct.nl/sites/default/files/2023-01/Mapping-the-Ideological-Landscape-of-Misogyny%20%282%29.pdf>.
Purwanti, S & Mas’ud, M 2019, ‘CONSUMPTION PRATICE IN THE BAUDRILLARD PERSPECTIVE’, Russian Journal of Agricultural and Socio-Economic Sciences, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. 40–50.
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Ritzer, G & Miles, S 2018, ‘The changing nature of consumption and the intensification of McDonaldization in the digital age’, Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 3–20, viewed 7 May 2024, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1469540518818628>.
Roser, M 2018, The Internet’s History Has Just Begun, Our World in Data, viewed 5 May 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/internet-history-just-begun>.
Weber, M 1991, ‘From Max Weber : Essays in Sociology’, Essays in Sociology, pp. 196–244, viewed 10 March 2024, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.otago.ac.nz/lib/otago/detail.action?docID=1111791.

This mixtape analysis was written for the University of Otago in the paper SOCI302 with an expected word count 200 per entry plus or mins 10% with seven total entries. All references are for images used to display the media analyzed.

Media is a flexible medium by which to explore and analyses social phenomena. Although, video games intrinsically require the active engagement and control of the user. It has laterality absent from other mediums like movies, it confronts with challenge. Decisions that shape a variety of predetermined outcomes that reflect individual efforts and experiences. Games explore history, politics, world wars and more in worlds that are made to closely resemble or hyperbolize their topic of interest. Hence a Hyperopia, a far-sightedness in presentation of their inspirators with observational patternable social theory therein reflective of some of what can be seen or perceived today.

Entry One: Turbo Overkill - Capitalist Realism

Today there is a calling for more cyber-futuristic themes across media. Its people are uncaring and cheerful despite lives of trauma, modifying their bodies with weapons to cause more suffering. Imagine the contrast though that once you start shopping at a vendor their speech is friendly, cheerful, and hopeful with occasional jests and claims things will get better if you buy their product. The world is intrinsically capitalistic but also ideologically circular in its foundations. People are weapons, and they’re fighting for health, security, and more weapons, the capitalist masters of the world simply permit it.
The game demonstrates an immense disconnect between these capitalistic overlords that provide people with the means to commit harm and damage with no more than a smile and a generated voice of encouragement. Nearly everyone has access to weapons and fighting for survival is an accepted fact of life. There is no escape from their influence, and comparatively, to the real world, I wonder about the meaningless wars started by old men in positions of capitalistic power. Inevitably there must be more to it, but on a surface perspective, Turbo Overkill feels that disconnect, that power, that inescapability without a shred of empathy from the rich. Rebellion, victory, war, and your own chance to survive is monetized and controlled despite even God-like horrors, its reach feels boundless.

Entry Two: The Talos Principle - Aesthetic Social Theory

In worlds where humans have long gone, and simulated machines yet to attain physicality solve puzzles, communicate with god (Elohim), talk philosophy with a nihilistic librarian program, and listen to time capsules of people long past, there exists a melancholy of what was and is desperately being held onto in a world of fakeness. The humans who’re gone talk of the world they lived in, building weapons with no semblance of concern for the preservation of humanity and culture. The machines they built are exposed to these cultures, each with referential plants that foretell human achievements.
Machines are all that’s left of the humans lest their structures only serve as their graves. In spite of all of this, hints of hope are scattered in the ruins. It seems everyone, including god and the machines, is fearful the aesthetics of humanity, will be lost. But as Alexandra Drennan says, “as long as people still walk, nothing is lost”, fearing loss of humanity I feel is real in the modern era especially considering the artifacts we fondly remember. We don’t want our cultures, families, and friends to be lost. The Talos Principle embraces that fear, regardless somehow humanity remains, and the meaning of that means something. But the form in how it remains, and the meaning thereof, are variable, yet irreplaceably powerful.

Entry Three: Bone Labs - Disappearance of Self

Bonelabs deliberately presents itself as an unfinished and basic virtual environmental space. One must play it in virtual reality but everything about it is both immersive, but obviously fake and empty. When you first enter the game space, you are nobody with a bag on your head going on a long linear journey that feels aimless and mystical. Its bleakness demonstrates a lack of focus, a constant shift of attention from firefights with null bodies, to a mineshaft ride, to a whole moon to traverse. Like a haze of a dream, nothing connects. This amorphism is topped off with a giant human avatar whom you meet, who tells you “I don’t need a player, I need a game master”, you become a body of many bodies, and those bodies are supposed to be yours, but they’re not.
Here the disappearance of self is perceivable in physicality. To access VR requires an absence from reality, to escape into this new space. Bonelabs environments and structure simulates a similar experience to flipping through video clips on a phone, the same radio plays the same song, the same texture can be seen from start to finish, yet we engage with every environment aimlessly. We overconsume these avatar bodies, and the environments as one subject. Whole maps may contain just you with seemingly endless items and distractions. The game makes you generate distance from yourself up until you stop playing. You reappear.

Entry Four: Modified Minecraft - Science and Technic Futurism

Minecraft has a strong reputation as a game of creativity and expressionism. It’s a world made of cubes that invite people to turn a world into whatever they see fit within the bounds of the content of the game. Minecraft isn’t very technological; it actually houses a very classically naturistic structure in which beauty and art are king. But when you modify it, Minecraft become a “kitchen sink” of items and systems. My home, now a factory, is a site where oil is pumped, I generate nuclear energy, and fire lasers to drill into the earth and create automated systems that reduce my workload. The art I cared for becomes a canvas for technics.
I came to appreciate the metaphysical perspectives of Bernard Stiegler. Once I exhausted my options as a human actor I turned to technology, I reshaped Minecraft into something else without a second thought. Lucious valleys of flowers where a cabin once proudly stood built by me became a baron wasteland of something that was with a backdrop of technology that eats the world. It's melancholic and intoxicating, but then I think about the real world. Minecraft is an accelerated world, but still, something gnaws in my head that perhaps what I see in modded Minecraft is a future that could be as the real world also technifies to degrees that have the world biting its nails in anticipation. Its futurism replacing nature in carelessness and excess.

Entry Five: Little Inferno – Social Reproduction Theory

“Just sit by your fire, burn all of your toys, and stay warm” is the façade message you here in Little Inferno repeated. The world outside is getting colder, and most people have taken to staying in their homes with a purchased “Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace” burning stuff to stave off the cold. You buy items, and after buying them you wait for them to arrive, and then you burn them. After burning you make a profit so you can buy more. During the game, a neighbour sends you messages pointing out the pointlessness and strangeness of what you and she are both doing, even saying “Could you turn around if you really wanted to?” but the perspective remains always fixed on the fireplace.
It feels on the nose, how the reproduction of life is almost despised in that you cannot look away and must keep burning stuff. Your friends at a point stop messaging you once they’ve managed to “look away” from the fireplace and move on with life until they remember you again. A message I kept wondering about was “I am burning away the time”, I don’t seem to do anything but engage in these systems of buying, burning and more buying. There is no reproduction outside the joy of burning things. To stop burning is to freeze, to look away from the fire requires more than just turning around. I had to burn my house down, I shattered the production of the fire to attain social reproduction.

Entry Six: VA-11 Hall-A – Queer Theory

Glitch City is a city unlike that of the real world. It's hyper dystopian and you're a bartender called Jill in a hopeless alley bar to serve drinks, chat people up, and change lives to the sound of music. The bar doesn’t have many patrons to start with, but as you get more folks in, you start to see familiar faces who have stories to tell some grim and some that reflect minority struggle in a cyberpunk world that exists outside the bar.
This game is built as a socialisation simulator almost, a literal allegory for the bartender consoling the patron trying to drown out sorrows for the moment. Many patrons are queer/LGBT, and on them are very esoteric choices of consumerist expression, people with uniquely coloured hair, or have undergone procedures of “catification” to get ears of a cat on their head. The bar Va11halla becomes a place of meeting up, of belonging. It becomes a way to carve out a life path for the patrons, whilst around them is a world where belonging is merely a suggestion. The expressions they bring with them reflect who they are in both class and origin.
But it is also your job, and the job funds your home and luxuries in which you decorate with Jill's interests some even reflecting her own queerness, they indulge in queer consumerism. Then you go back to work to start all over again.

Entry Seven: Divinity Dragon Commander: Decolonisation Theory

To be the dragon commander is to be the autocratic master of a kingdom under great war and scrutiny. It requires strategy in both war and politics, and it's difficult to always do the right thing in your own eyes. Decolonization theory is somewhat loosely tied to Dragon Commander, as the ethnicities of the world tend to all exist under the same social hegemony with their conflicts being defined politically.
The races are everywhere, but civilisations that facilitate them have to individually consider each of their customs in both developing and developed locales. It's an aggressive multiculturism where a lot of the norms seem to mostly conform to humans, of which the dragon commander is a half-breed. With each decision you make one or more of the races disagree lowering their favour, and sometimes the decisions you make are necessary to win the ongoing war in Rivellon. At one point I had to weigh desecrating an elven heritage site for resources. I had to weigh carefully the consideration and efforts I put into respecting the cultural beliefs and ideals of each person.
But the ultimate thing I realized was, all these political decisions I had to make weren’t always about the war, they were undoing a standard that did not consider the people it squandered like the gender wage gap, the press, race relations and more. In the political phase, it was an effort of the Ethic of Restoration that ground against the war effort. It was a balancing act not of domination, but an attempt at equal solidarity as good as I could attain.

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This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper SOCI302 with an expected word count of 2500 plus or mins 10% (2639 total). There are 28 references used for this essay.

Personhood, One must ask what is happening to personhood in the modern world. Families and onlookers ponder over the changing of people, the changing of what it is to be people. Online images have taken to depicting the average man being dependent on their phones and computers, a steep contrast to days of old. However, we must consider how fundamental social structures are changing us, and how that change not only affects individuals but society. Capitalism for instance, among other technologically progressing systems is changing people into naught more than numbers and categories. People are becoming more digital entities than physical. Today some people would claim humanity is unvalued and merely a target of capitalism, we are measured by the utility we provide to entities larger than us, we are becoming machines of data. This may in fact only be partially true, as the integration of people and our disappearance of data is a visible march of acceptance.
Before more modern technology, the onus of sociality and interaction was largely stringent on the individual’s physical capacity. There did not exist a convenient system by which users could access all their information and consume content from one place. Nor was there a system for entrepreneurs and the powerful to utilise in that same line (Valley AI, 2022). Technology like computers draws an extensively important line in the changes of social, political, and capitalistic structures. Although it is these technologies that are built upon a continued progression of society and culture. The changes in society relative to technology are neither objectively all bad nor good, the introduction of these systems challenge concurrent structures and are perceivable as extensions to the human condition rather than substitutions and luxuries. The query in particular is, if these are extensions of ourselves, are people willing to submit those extensions our ourselves to other beings in technological space such as digital media? (Logan, 2019)
As a general outline, it is best to recognize two core forces that play into manifesting both the shift and concerns thereof. The digitization of peoples come at the cost of bettering technology for the convenience and progression of humanity, at least in theory. Key to this ultimate purpose include underpinning such as:

The Commodification and Valuation of Human Utility play a role in technological social shifts and maintaining questionable capitalistic practices resulting in the disappearance.

Everyone is an actor of hyperreality, and capitalism constantly remoulds hyperreality in retaliation to change. By proxy data serves capitalists' desires by the dissolution of movements into marketable objects.

Through the combined works of Jean Baudrillard and Mark Fisher, this essay aims to describe and link social theories of human disappearance and capitalist realism to the perpetuation of how the lives of first-world society have been distorted and commodified. People are assimilated into digital data structures to disappear. In turn, capitalism's marketing of data becomes foundational to digital media, and people as data disappear become overconsuming capitalist zombies. It becomes a vicious struggling cycle that due to its rootedness, is immovable.

On Baudrillard’s - Disappearance, Overconsumption, Zombification

As the digital medium has grown, so has our life “portfolio”. Today it is arguable that living a digital and physical life begets a duality stasis of dominance and recessive aspects of that personhood. According to writings by Baudrillard and Evans (1991), their concerns lie greatly in the “hyperreality” that technology has granted people. This hyperreality is described as utopian in that people have more reality than required. As an example of what that means, we can edit and improve digital appearances to be better and more real than the physical us. That more real version comes to supersede, change, and shape the real.
The ideas of hyperreality continue in Baudrillard’s (2009) work suggesting the paradoxical question of the disappearance of people and being neither good nor bad. Baudrillard suggests that “to analyse means to dissolve” that’s to suggest people become hyper-consumers of information till lines of too much or too little become clouded. The satisfaction individuals seek evokes perspectives of equality and liberty that are frequently promoted but subsequently eroded by the overconsumption of them, it becomes more paralytic than practical. As part of this process, people depart as living actors to become observers of a world we live outside of, whilst paradoxical actors persist. Although people do not embrace the disappearance and rather wallow in it, this disappearance is a key tool in the “integral drive” that can deconstruct evil where this overconsumption flourishes Baudrillard (2009).
Baudrillard’s writing suggests that perhaps without resistance and continued improper use of this disappearance, humans as part of their disappearances become proverbial capitalist “zombies” that simply lean further into overconsumption and dissolution Baudrillard (2009). It is not like the zombification is a conscious action of capitalism however, it is an immersion into disappearance that self-perpetuates. An article titled “Living as a Zombie in Media” by Deuze (2013) investigates this meaninglessness in which they describe an erasure of self through the “drive of our devices”. The distinctiveness of individuals, real and media are blurred as people reproduce themselves in some overconsumed media.

Capitalist Realism - Struggling in Place

Another perspective worth exploring alongside Baudrillard’s work is the motility of individuals and groups within this capitalistic state of human disappearance. In the book “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative” Mark Fisher (2009) considers the concept of escapability from capitalism and the weaknesses of anti-capitalism. Fisher's ideas confound that capitalism has weaknesses that are deliberately conducive to the ideological project; capitalism foundationally benefits off the manipulation and misfortune of its target demographics, and modern issues like COVID-19 aren’t free from the profit motive that squanders health and productivity (Cohen, 2020). But the capitalistic ideology is so rooted in the modern world it makes it difficult to deviate from the linear mode of individual progression. That is lest you oppose law or expend other resources.
Capitalism is perceived as structurally restrictive. Research by Weiss (2022) states that capitalism compared to other social systems alienates individuals by turning their social reproduction into a reproduction of capitalism. Work is needed for necessities, and responsibilities that extend from work get subjugated by that necessity. As such ‘Capitalism needs labour power, birth, and care but the struggles of which are anti-capitalist are not recognised’.
From a neo-liberalistic point of view, the capitalist system differentiates that the consumption of society demonstrates optimism in society's market distribution of resources such as data. The neoliberal perception of society capitalistically infers competitiveness which resorts to differences in societal value of individuals. Success becomes driven by individualism and competition (Card and Hepburn, 2022). According to research by Suzanne Klein Schaarsberg, (2023), they outline an ever-fastening way of living that introduces problems. Social problems are simply not able to be properly engaged without social organization. Solutions available become personalized and self-cultivating. Data continues and the individual's disappearance becomes problem adjacent. They don't just disappear, they hone and observe.

Machining of People: From Individuals to Valuated Datapoints

Since the advent of public internet interfacing, social media have been growing rapidly since the early 2000s and Facebook in 2018 netted over 2 billion alone (Ortiz-Ospina, 2019). Technology and the internet especially have become core parts of work and reproduction of life, although to access the internet means to give the internet access to you. The necessity of technology and the internet by proxy jeopardizes people to its surveillance and systems (Mineo, 2017). While the internet is a paid service, what services therein are what turns us into data. The relevance and presence of social media surround a quote by Richard Serra in 1973 that states “if something is free, you are the product” Many attribute its message to the concurrent business model of social media like Facebook and their data gathering (Roy, 2018).
People “disappearing” into data points has been the long reluctant but accepted state of media. Titans like Facebook, now Meta as Fuchs (2012) outlines make money by free users coming to the platform as “free workers” and “consumers” that provide personal data to the site. Facebook isn’t a media entity alone, but more of an advertising haven and surveillance network that is politically and socio-politically active in its intrusion and melting down into a pot of the social world. Media has infiltrated more than just our sociality for data, but even insomuch as peoples dating (Minina, Masè and Smith, 2022) where even algorithms that harvest users’ data is used to persuade users to buy into their market services to fare better in dating to find the perfect match. One might argue data is core to “selling ourselves” as part of applying for careers and social positions, although there does exist a more abstract exchange of employee data to data brokers for the valuation of industry worthiness and data points (Simmons, 2023).
It is the data of individuals that allow for the circulation of consumption. Capitalistically it is data that could be algorithmically applied to entice and manipulate demographics using both the digital and physical medium (Zarsky, 2019). Concerning disappearance and Baudrillard (2009), this infers that data also opens an opportunity for overconsumption designed to invite as many individuals as possible to its use. It is a convenience that disintegrates appearance for disappearance.
For instance, learning AI supervisors and assistants are now monoliths that make data and work more digestible, personalized, and manageable while disconnecting users from aspects of its responsibility and social presence (Seo et al., 2021), some even being used to hijack and complete one’s work for them (Fallon, 2023). It produces a library of overconsumption and short-cuts for the common subject that opposes the perspective of a person looking into a society without them, into a perspective of a person having a machine looking into the society for them.
With overconsumption a capitalistic product, data that is harvested works to help expose individuals to further overconsumption usually through “targeted advertising”. Advertising of this nature allows overconsumed products to manifest (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 2021). The data we generate by presence become analytical tools for capitalist forces liquidating into numbers that need to be coerced into buying into their overconsumption.
The model of machining people into data also supports to ideas of Mark Fisher (2009) demonstrating the circular goals to not only overconsume but recycle capitalist systems to integrate all demographics to “buy in” even if oppositional to fitness. Data collection poses risks that permit people that gather it into aggressive coercion and also be able to algorithmically determine who you are and what you stand for (Smith, 2019). As part of this revelation data in capitalist realism becomes one of the many usable weapons in “data capitalism” which is built on the fundamental disparity of power in user class (Lubin, 2022)
The question therefore is, if all these forces are interconnected insofar as to encourage the disappearance of people, as well as work to trap users into the capitalistic system, what options are available for the users? Baudrillard (2009) makes note of the lack of engagement individuals have with the medium of disappearance. He states that one of the blights that make the disappearance of people worthy of concern is that people zombify themselves. Willingly we overconsume and allow for overconsumption to grow. As far as capitalism is concerned, as Mark Fisher (2009) states, capitalism uses money to make money, this zombification purported by Baudrillard is thereby one of the forces that is paid for by neoliberal demand and profit. Hence the system works and keeps working. We give data, and data gives us to media creators, which in turn generates more engagement and thus more data. People are attuned to this cycle each moment their devices lay in hand.

Lost our Personalized Digital Vistas

The largest impact of the generational technology shift is how the concept of identity and society is challenged by internet space as Baudrillard attests in hyperreality (Baudrillard and Evans, 1991). Identities online aren’t built as biographies but rather as tools of personal development and cultural representation. It’s a system of affirmation of self that comparatively to the physical world is not as inflexible. Such that nicknames can become their identity and the profile simulacra for them to express by (Subrahmanyam and Šmahel, 2010).
Scarily concerning digitization of people into data, while online our data isn’t sold by the individual responsible for it, there does exist an attitude of willingness of individuals relative to the approval of handling of that data, and the extent by which it can benefit them (Cloos et al., 2019). Doubly concerning are the opinions of data leaks that pry individual privacies within government institutions, as the Edward Snowden data leaks of the NSA have American citizens split on the harm and good of bringing that data collection to light (Geiger, 2018). It does not seem like the majority of people are all that concerned with data. Many people let it wash over them in media as another consumable in the overconsumed media already manufactured in the digital data machine. There may be more to this split in concern, however.
Since the common adoption of digitizing individuals’ lives, concerns have risen as to its psychological, and sociological impacts on people. Baudrillard’s worries about our disappearance are somewhat linked with these impacts, students for instance can either improve people’s sociality and esteem whereas others with strenuous exacerbate depressive tendencies and fade in presence (Cotten, 2008). As a sociological entity however, technology like social media is a progressive tool, Gen Z, of the 1990s to 2010s as researched by Hu, Hu and Hou (2022), use technology to either access information, or to digitally express oneself to accrue social capital.
Unlike the conversation of data, this data is consciously given incrementally its engagement limited to the words of the creator, its data given. Ideologically however there exists a underpinning of deceit. Take for instance anti-capitalist movements that exist in capitalist societies, to be anti-capitalist is definitionally nebulous. Regardless the idea surrounding improving society by removing problems causes such as class issues tends to be popular. As per capitalistic opportunity, it doesn’t seem unlike digital neoliberal motive to make anti-capitalism marketable. Much like they do other social issues in work brand activism despite their disconnect and lack of authenticity for profit (Mirzaei, Wilkie and Siuki, 2022). The movement then becomes circular, even movements that aim to tackle social issues become digitized and faded. Anti-capitalism can then become a platform for capitalism to thrive (Fisher, 2009) and the meaning of social movements brittles, as people become observers of the paradox but not demonstrators, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Baudrillard's idea of disappearance encapsulates the self-fulfilling prophecy perfectly, the evil capitalistic opportunistic system becomes stronger. The medium of disappearance is underappreciated, people just immerse themselves and consume. Data is made, and consumption becomes overconsumption, problems become consumables and dull rapidly. Steadily, it is a willing engagement into a very tight capitalistic zombification.

Conclusion

In closing, Baudrillard’s perspectives on the disappearance of people in what he refers to as overconsumption and hyperreality speak to a lot of the internal structures that concern the current public perception of how humanity is evolving and changing. People generally are indirectly engaged in data whether they like it or not. Through our engagement with the hyperreality surrounding us, consumption of data becomes personalised and trained on systems built to capitalistically optimise and maximise consumption. Society continues to observe in their own absence, indoctrinating and digitizing selves into these monolithic data structures that now encircle life. That is what is meant by we’re disappearing. Mark Fisher supplements these perspectives with their conceptualisation of capitalist realism insomuch as everything is capitalised. There is a predisposition to capitalist control into condensable data that not only works to disappear people by pretending to help but perpetuates social issues whilst maintaining this Baudrillard-esque controlling zombification of the common folk.

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This essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper ANTH327 with an expected word count of 5000 plus or minus 10% with a total of 5364 words. There are 37 references used for this essay.

It seems to be the case that in society, some core interactions and systems exist in our surroundings and culture that help to construct an identity for individuals. In knowing that, what people understand as society has become more complex as technology has gone to such lengths as to not just connect all of us globally through one internet but build its own cultures and societies therein. As part of this project, I set out to engage in an online social multiplayer experience known as VRChat; a platform known for community-sourced content, lack of a paywall, and the impact it has made on sociality online. In this endeavour I sought to build upon the reasonable claims of Brickell’s reflective self, posing that there is more to identity in today’s post-modernistic mediums that seem to suggest a more complex system by which identity and self are formed.

Background on the Identity Project Program Choice

Virtual reality is a multi-faceted term that generally refers to any online virtual spFace that generates a simulated synthetic immersive reality of which purpose varies (Sheldon, 2022). Most social virtual reality spaces provide a means to present the identity of an individual, typically through the form of a username followed by a visual representation such as an image or avatar. VRChat is unique in that it’s a relatively recent program beginning in 2014 which planned to utilize new and still growing technology at the time, virtual reality equipment (VRChat Inc., n.d.). Key to this equipment is its capacity to provide input feedback to the computer to accurately interpret and imitate any real-world action into the virtual world, for most people this only tracks the head and arms with legs being optional and typically guessing positions.
Comparatively to other forms of virtual reality it is my position that this evolution of virtual reality has serious illustrative power that may provide important insights into our understanding of the formation of identity beyond more common uses of internet virtual realities. I believe in this potential because this new-form virtual reality goes beyond normal immersion standards to allow for body language, social liberty in the form of open-source code, and a real-adjacent virtual community. Although it must be stressed that virtual reality of this kind is a niche demographic which is evident across VRChat’s estimated daily player count of 54,400 and 7.8 million registered players (Stats, 2017). VR is largely still in its infancy and its commercial costs and resource costs are quite high, hence its potential may not be fully realized.

Discussing Brickell

According to Brickell, we as people perform our “selves” as a routine response to our personal, interpersonal, and communal surroundings. It is the cultures, mechanisms of society, symbols, and people that are active constructors that indirectly or directly help the individual create their sense of self and sense of being through interactions. Notably, Brickell only approaches this idea through the lens of gender, but given the ubiquitous nature of identity formation, I believe it can be applied to multiple other aspects of identity and society. The idea we make our identities from reflections in society isn’t a far cry from who we are as people and whom we identify with, we label ourselves categorically by known concepts and effective schemas to not only make sense of ourselves but so we as people can make sense of each other (Brickell, 2003).
Much of Brickell’s (2003) work focuses heavily on the idea that socially, people have been categorically put into a gender binary arrangement and in this arrangement, there is a set of rules and routines for each binary that people perform and present as part of their reflective formation of identity. In society, there isn’t necessarily a “right” way of being concerning identity, but society functions off these norms and regurgitates them by proxy of the majority, and they are foundational to the structure of most societies making them essential to the system.
However, it is my understanding that there is more to the self than a reflective construction. I believe in large part, when we are determining the self and the limitations of what the self is, there exists a philosophical divide and or perspective that divides the conversation. The question asked is “What defines and begets self”, Also is identity formation fluid in turbulent, changing, individualistically constructive and post-structural societies? It is in new form virtual realities Brickell’s notion is challenged especially.
I partially agree with the assertions of Brickell. People in cultures tend to be shaped by the mode by which that culture defines its categorical ideas of identity (Stets & Burke, 2000). Cultural normalities are typically gravitated towards, such as male and female distinctions. Brickell, for instance, concerning gender outlines common gender roles that women are generally understood to have smaller bodies, wear certain clothing articles, and have unique secondary sexual characteristics, among other feminine things whereas men typically in society contrast and differ (Brickell, 2003). Although culturally, western society has become more “multicultural” which culminates in communities to combine cultures and ideas to form a sum of culture. The more multicultural a society becomes the more ideas of identity and being exist (Hurn & Tomalin, 2013).
Considering too technological advancement, there has come the advent and ever-continuing growth of the online world. Ambitious creators and pioneers have set out to effectively make a “second world” that is functionally different from the real world but is simulative thereof generally referred to as “the metaverse” (De Felice et al., 2023). The digital world is a very globalized medium, anyone with an established connection can join the online sphere in which many cultures and types of people exist, it has the potential to be the most multicultural space available to people. But I suspect also that culture to the digital medium can be somewhat superfluous, as the internet tends to form its own cultures or metaverses out of its spontaneous forums such as fictional groups indulging in roleplay in chatrooms, and mockeries of otherwise real grounded realities. VRChat is a sandbox, in which the community that comes into it, with the right skills and unique personhood build worlds of their own (Buchholz, Oppermann & Prinz, 2022).
It is possible, that in some online social contexts, we bring aspects of our culture into the real world to help us form an identity in a virtual world, but it is virtual reality that changes our attitudes on sociality and topics. As Nikolaou, Schwabe & Boomgaarden (2022) puts it, virtual reality may have the ability to provide a sense of presence around and with distant other people, all the while providing a distance from real-world issues insofar as they are more approachable such as conversations on identity. But additionally, on an individualistic level as researched by Freeman et al. (2022) highlights, people of controversial and complex identities such as non-cis gendered individuals use applications such VRChat as a means of exploring many identities by collecting and saving multiple avatars that reflect who they are in differing states, time, and contexts to swap with on the fly. Having multiple identities usually belong to multiple real-world cultural conformities and ease of customizability in things like clothing and body type is very key to this process.
In my experiences, I found myself using VRChat to not only explore the sociality therein but also to experience how I would go about building my identity. The truth with building an identity in VRChat though, is that it's hard to just make an identity and engage. But rather, I selected multiple avatars that seemed interesting to me and saved them to my VRChat library of avatars, I found them by searching keywords like "Plant Boy" and "Butterfly". At the end of the day, I didn't build an identity, but rather I came in as myself, and the extent of identity expression is reducible to the equivalent of picking a shirt and face to wear. The complexity of VRChat as a whole made the creation of identity a somewhat simple one due to its open and free forum, but due to the way the medium functions, it is difficult to enter the virtual world here as anything other than yourself which this report will explain.

Triality: The Mind, and the Two Bodies

Spending time in VRChat has provided some unique insights into what this “performativity” and “identity” exactly is and manifests by. According to Huang, Kumar & Hu (2021), it seems to be the case that people find a sense of freedom of expression in their online identities. Their identities are constantly changing and shifting at mere exposure to new media, new people, and discoveries of self. There is this idea that people want to express the “Best Selves” which is potentially why it was the case that in VRChat a general majority of public users pick out decadent avatars and adhere to heteronormative and attractive bodily standards not too dissimilar from the hyper-reality purported in other virtual media by the work of Nunes (1995), in which people embrace abandoning the real for these hyperreal depictions of self or Childs (2011) idea of creating a representative truer self.
I propose there is a schematical system by which to understand this duality of virtual and real, using a system of triality. In psychological study, there is an understanding of individuals realizing their duality of mind and soul, which differ in physicality and contradict each other in desires versus circumstances. Insofar as it is questionable if the body is us, or even ours (Mcleod, 2018).
In this virtual world, this second body I believe can be considered the third aspect of self to form “triality”. The mind, physical body, and digital body. According to Butler (1993), they describe the symbolism of the soul as a blueprint and master that dictates the materiality of the body that comes thereafter. It’s a honed system that is separate from the body and decides the body for what could be an otherwise conflicted individual in future. To build on this, I believe that it is the case that people in the digital medium live in this triality, in which neighbouring the real body and mind, the digital body can match and co-exist with the mind in tandem.
Linking Brickell (2003) to this triality, the mind and person make efforts to make the body match the mind, whereas society and culture influence the mind into these ideas. Although VRChat seemingly gives a person a theoretically infinite number of means by which to express themselves, especially in identity. In this triality, I propose, cultural and societal structures have the potential to be eroded by the digital medium in this way. Nunes (1995) refers to “The Precession of Simulacra” which means that the identity of us, is overwritten by the digital recreation and simulation of us, and thus becomes the template of us. For VRChat, this is flexible as avatars are easily swappable and the culture of “VR” encourages otherwise otherworldly forms of identity expression Freeman et al. (2022). Even for those in conformity with normativity, it is interpretable as a “third body of many bodies”. The ultimate multicultural society where anyone from anywhere can meet, even those of which that are fictional.
But a core distinction of the triality is the mind still governs both bodily forms, but the extent is varied. When looking at a digital body it is important to measure the extent of influence the body and soul has over that body. Social VR users enter the world as themselves rather than as a character they control (Lin & Latoschik, 2022). That ability to bridge our bodies and sociality into the virtual space unto a body of our choice is necessary for this triality to fully be realized, lest the digital body only be a husk of interpretations of its creator. This is what makes mediums such as VRChat an exceptional case, as it makes use of new VR technology to make the digital body and real body interdependent of each other to form one body between two realities hence eliminating the existence of digital bodies, we are the bodies.

Hyperreality of Another World

In the article by Nunes (1995) they expand on the work of Baudrillard in which the online space attributes itself to a “hyperreality” which describes cyberspace as a literal highway of information people ride upon to traverse cyberspace. The users assume simulacra or body in this space, which they define as a representation and imitation of the self. Hence these simulacrums typically become the thing we’re recognized by in online spaces in the form of pictures, avatars, and names with one exception. The simulacra can also can and tends to meet the extremes and desires of the user’s image of self to become “hyperreal”.
Virtual reality is known by many different people under different categorizations and principles. Years prior virtual reality was recognized in more low-tech environments such as MUDS and MOOS. These were simple chatrooms designed for user interaction in an established setting, where users describe simulations of the interaction between characters they make and act, as simulacra (Turkle, 1994). VRChat being highly community-sourced hinges on the creativity of the users through the capabilities of a highly acclaimed game software engine unity, providing an unprecedented amount of creative freedom for the direction of VRChat, similarly to how a MUD or MOO may operate with time. This hyperreality of the self only heightens with the evolution of virtual realities and hence is imperative to identity construction online.
To add to some of the claims of Nunes (1995), they describe an unbridgability in media and virtual experiences that disallows the physical body to travel into the virtual space and henceforth limits the immersion of identity. I think in part, as VR has grown the physical body has been gifted a unique capacity to travel through cyberspace and it is this privilege that creates this hyper-real world that demonstrates a competency to substitute the real in a more real than realized way. VR interactivity has generated a closer, intimate, and fulfilling environment in which long-distance relationships can be strengthened and even the act of sleeping, watching movies, sports, performing, exercising, and partying is a part of the experience that our physical bodies are involved with despite it being virtual as described by Freeman et al. (2022).
According to research by Bollmer & Suddarth (2022), VR strived to simulate the physicality of the body there comes a point in immersion and VR design that the physicality of the real and virtual body synchronizes in parallelism. Users in social VR not only must overcome the challenge of accustoming to VR to overcome nausea and dizziness but also must bridge the gaps of the physical that are otherwise not real by involuntary development of a phantom sense, in which the synchronization of the body and avatar becomes strong and one’s surroundings can be perceived to a certain extent (Krell & Wettmann, 2023). It is through this consistent assimilation with virtual reality that users become more immersed and blur the lines and the real and the non-real which develops a strong connection with self and the simulacra.
As users experience this completeness, they also are subject to experiencing the social world of VR. As Novak (2022) describes users of VRChat generally don’t perceive VRChat as a “game” despite its allusions to one and instead view it as a distinct society of its own. Similarly, to the ways society works in real life, VRChat builds its community and people of “Social Groupings” and the systems that govern those are largely community-built. Some of the community as well can be so devoted to VRChat insofar as to sacrifice personal real-world responsibilities and form social bonds including romantic ones in the virtual world as opposed to the real.
VR ought to be immersive for users to feel belonging. What people ought to find that these simulacra, across various online forums, they tend to gravitate towards conformity and heteronormativity. In VR this is in part the case, Kyrlitsias et al (2020) find that social presence in virtual reality is very important to influence a person's behaviour in virtual reality. Integration of social VR norms is equally as important and VRChat’s community approaches this via what Ratan et al. (2019) describes as a “Proteus Effect” in which avatars of unique, abnormal, and unreal characteristics inform a person’s performativity insofar as wallet-sized avatars floating to talk at eye level being normalized. One other major challenge is that a virtual reality setup needs to be advanced enough though as to not malfunction to increase immersion. The identity a person assumes can also work as a mask that bolsters an already existing sense of anonymity in the online space to hide oneself but add social presence in VR can nullify issues of perception of lack of social consequences. As usually online personal responsibility is less imperative to an individual if they feel detached from a social context (Jordan, 2019). There suggests a possibility that in an alternative scenario, people may also reject social conformity in favour of either themselves or something that exists outside the status quo in their own perception. Comparatively to Brickell (2003), this is where I believe the partiality of reflective identity can be seen and, in some cultures, deconstructed.
Much like in VRChat in my experience, there were times when people could be seen identifying as people in hyper-muscular bodies, hyper-idealistic body shapes, with very hyper-sexualized clothing, which were in general very hyper-real and distant from the real. Even more different from the real though were the droves of users with simulacra that weren’t even human, or humanoid. Some simulacra people could use were effectively hand puppets, robots, anthropomorphic avatars, memes, and literal impersonations of people. Some identities just aren’t human, and the online identity often is built on or writhing with lies of characteristics; the offline identity doesn’t have to parallel the online one (Huang, Kumar & Hu, 2021).
As Montemorano (2020) puts it, avatars are performed and assumed by individuals based on their cultural associations and also VRChat cultures. Much like the performativity of gender, it’s instead a performativity of the avatar, as people assume the avatar they become actors of them which can work to ground a person socially and contextually. The choice of avatar is a deliberate choice, perhaps not only of their reflections on experiences, but also because of their interests, creativity, and personal challenge in assuming a character.
Part of this is a direct result of how people do VR as opposed to Brickell’s concept of performing and “doing gender” instead of people online “doing virtual reality”. A report by McVeigh-Schultz et al. (2018) demonstrates an inherent systemic mode of being in the virtual reality space. Social VR profiles differ from platform to platform and the means by which people can interact with one another also differs such as in-built mechanics for handshakes to add them to your friends list in RecRoom VR. Comparatively to other VR social platforms, VRChat for instance is very nebulous in function as the mode of interaction is handled by the user's body and avatar functionality. Hence there isn’t an in-built rule system or limitations other than outright hardware limitations. To put it, the design of VR and the hyper-reality of VR influences people, sociality in VR can differ from sociality in the real world just enough to invent its own reality. In terms of VRChat, the sociality there is very multi-versal involving any variety of social contexts in one place as a sort of melting pot of cultures, peoples, and identities Montemorano (2020). 

Forming a Virtual Community: The Mirrors and Neotribal Identity

Like other only virtual spaces, there exist several barriers to entry for people to join them. Elias Le Grand (2018) outlines a key aspect of classism that exists within these groups named “neo-tribes”. A neo-tribe is a fluid small form community of people generally spontaneously formed out of common interests, a set of beliefs, and hobbies. Neotribes contrast with subcultures, as subcultures are more clearly defined with rulesets, that are widely recognised as being the law and will of the subculture.
Concerning VRChat and VR as a whole, there are a variety of micro-communities that exist in the medium as their neo-tribes, in my report I outline my journeys with the Adventure Team, a small invite-only group that was met spontaneously, but also I discuss the common occurrence of what most refer to as mirror culture, which is a phenomenon in which people crowd around mirrors in public worlds to communicate and spend time together.
For the hierarchies and class characteristics of neo-tribes however as Le Grand (2018) builds upon the neo-tribe framework, VR being a variably costly luxury not only financially but with time, means there is a certain barrier of class in people that have ease of access to the medium, even the most casual all-in-one VR setups such as the Oculus Quest 2 cost around $700 and more depending on the extent of VR accessories (Meta Quest, 2020). But additionally, to be in VR requires an avatar that is easily found and community sourced, but to make one can sometimes require rarely held computer literacy in modelling, texturing, and unity engine familiarity (Lin & Wang, 2014). As a result, the most successful and active users on the medium will generally consist of those with the upper hierarchy of computer knowledge and flexible enough finances.
There is also complicates of engagement with VR relative to the capacity of the individual. Disabilities especially ones that limit body motility are a barrier to the use of VR in both the setup and activity therein. Some disabilities can be accounted for through such as hearing loss, which there exist communities and practice of sign language through finger tracking technology (Zhang et al. 2022)
The largest barrier that exists is time. People having to work jobs and look after their families in their homes will have the least ease of access to the virtual reality medium. VRChat requires a consistent presence of the body in its interactions and given that communities are highly variable in location globally, and activity. During the COVID-19 pandemic however there was an increase in the adoption of VR systems (Ball, Huang & Francis, 2021), and with more time available due to many having to work from home, and loss of social presence VR was a functional substitute for social interaction at the time if not financially implausible (Rzeszewski & Evans, 2020). Beyond that, there will inevitably be groups of people barred from engaging with VRChat due to time constraints with work or time zone.
This implies an important mechanism in the reflective identity of Brickell (2003) as well. The reflective construction of self is relegated to social position. To be disabled, poor, or without appropriate time, the aspects of cultures you can reflect an identity from becomes more starved. Identity is henceforth further complicated as our identities are directly influenced by the privilege of the individual and not just the cultural surroundings of us. The more privilege, the more access you accrue, and much like how Brickell compares differences between male and female performativity, that itself is tied to the privileges and roles of gender in culture. As Le Grand (2018) thereby suggests, is that the neo-tribes most accessible to us are the most inclusive of us and hence key to formulating parts of our identity.

Mirror Dwelling

Throughout VRChat a common theme in any public world I found in my report was the consistency of users to crowd around mirrors. At these mirrors, people would talk as if there were at an outing and interact in subtle ways like resting their head on another’s lap. The mirror only reflects them and others like a system of self-worship. According to research by Bujić & Thibault (2022), mirrors in media are symbolic of illusions, truths, and worlds alternative. Mirrors are a mechanism by which people find affirmation by peering into the perception of others unto themselves, and it is the avatar as well as the feedback of the body in virtuality that strengthens the affirmation. It provides a sense of body ownership and provides a sense of embodiment of a body that is not real. Research by Fu et al. (2023) builds on the mirror-dwelling phenomenon, as mirrors in VRChat tend to be areas of the congregation to facilitate voiced conversation between users. Users retain a sense of anonymity and cultivate an attachment to their avatar or simulacra which in turn alters how they behave; the mirror helps this process. Hence, it’s not that the mirrors just affirm the people, but in the culture of VR, mirror dwelling is ritualised as a way of meeting and forming relationships with people to build oneself much as Le Grand's (2018) features of rituals in neo-tribes suggest.
Findings by Freeman et al. (2020) found that users in VRChat consider social virtual reality to have evolved beyond that of traditional virtual worlds and online games/forums. Individuals have heightened engagement in their avatar identity and in large part because instead of traditional forums having you control the avatar on a screen, places like VRChat have the avatar directly parallel the users' movements from a first-person perspective, hence becoming the avatar. As more of the body is integrated into the body of VRChat too, the sense of expressiveness, presence, and avatar connectedness increase (Wu et al., 2021). One of the common notions is that the avatar they are is their gateway into becoming the person they want to be in the “mirror”. In turn, becoming the avatar, and the body of the individual becoming the controller of the avatar challenges the notion of “bodies” online. A key aspect of how most virtual realities work, is we’re bound by the capacities of the body relative to the control we have. From the third person, we tell our simulacra to interact with an object, but we cannot control how they interact with it. VRChat breaks this barrier effectively destroying the notion that there are online bodies and that the bodies are the person, and the simulacra or avatar, the skin they wear.
With respect to how we interact with these perceived online bodies, there tends to be this idea that we develop relationships with bodies rather than “become them”. Research by Vella (2016) describes the agency of the player in games being reduced to a “cursor” as a body. The character on screen we assume is one we steer as a vehicle on a journey. There are some parts of ourselves that we in some cases can integrate such as our own voice by which to speak through the character, but there still exists that split between the player and character. Characters in virtual realities are libraries designed to react using a variety of possible “parts” of the character, such as animations, sounds, and computer transactions. The divide is nullified when we can fully assume the body as if it were our own and the library becomes dependent only on the individual and the functionality of the avatar they wear.
When we consider this embodiment in the alternative reality, we ought to question how this reflects Brickells reflective construction of self. Once engaged with mediums like VRChat we can immerse ourselves in the alternative reality and our alternative selves. Rather than being a reactive construction of our surroundings, the mirror is the reflection of our alternative selves, there being a multiple of ourselves. Like how we choose our avatars, of which users have multiple, we affirm ou many parts of who were therein. We are one individual body, of many possible performativity, reflections, and conformities, and that which we choose is dependent on the contexts we engage with. 

The Adventure Team Neo-Tribe

In my experience in VRChat, I found myself searching for a group of people by striking up random conversations with people in public worlds, usually through mirror-dwelling. The Adventure Team is a group of people I was introduced to via someone I met, this group according to the numbers on the VRChat group system counted just over 100 users, but the amount of the “adventures” they’d go on usually remained just under 20 users. The Adventure Team I believe is a prime example of a virtual reality neo-tribe. Just as much as Elias Le Grand (2018) suggests, this neo-tribe formed out of individuals' mutual interests in exploring new and interesting user-created worlds. In this neo-tribe existed no strict way of being or common identity and was instead a culmination of individuals of similar invested interests.
As an outsider of this neo-tribe, in my interactions, there was a clear comradery and kinship between the users. Instead of exclusively doing map exploring, they’d also involve themselves in common activities. In my own experience, I found myself constantly immersing myself in the social space, I wasn’t a character but rather an individual, the conversation would reach into my personal life, and the avatar was nothing but clothes. I was the body, and as the body I could integrate myself into their activities and we could act as we would in a real situation “vibing” so to speak as I engaged with their weekly dance gyms. I was engaging my digital and real body with the activities rather than remotely as Piitulainen, Hämäläinen & Mekler (2022) describe as a mode of expression, an experience otherwise distant when split from the body.
The identity of the Adventure Team was more casual than one with an express setting such as roleplay-centric groups. One key aspect of being an Adventure Team member was the adornment of an Adventure Team badge somewhere on the main avatar of a member, as well as publically displaying the affiliation of their social VR profile for VRChat. Additionally, Adventure Teamers functioned like coaches talking to each other through personal experiences, offering advice, and helping each other. These insights have led me to suspect that much as in VRChat there is a way of “doing VR” and rituals that most adhere to like mirror-dwelling, these neo-tribes demonstrate a loose form of doing VR that exists within the confines of the program, but hinges on the whims of the community therein.

Closing

In closing, I believe in large part that the formation of identity is one that is further complicated since the advent of new-form VR. While there is a strong basis to the reflective self posed by Brickell, virtual realities have opened new avenues by which identity can be created and explored by not only adhering to the known social phenomenon in the real world but by post-structuralist evolution of sociality in worlds outside the real. VRChat especially being one of the epicentres of a growing virtual reality community demonstrates a special and unique perspective on how people approach their own avatar or simulacra, and how immersion encapsulates the empowered desire for a truer self. Additionally perspectives relative to the duality and hybridism of self-being extended by a second self act to diversify the identity of self, opening doors into an amorphous changing virtual body of many faces to act as parts of a bigger identity that they represent. VRChat also offers a unique ethos by which a ubiquitous amount of communities have formed that act as core systems by which identity and personhood are affirmed in the community. As it stands, I believe VRChat has outlined to me how identity is a fluid and constantly changing part of who we are, but answers by with identity is formed runs deeper than Brickell suggests. VRChat is a tool by which we can apply our own identity to, but also a tool where virtual cultures otherwise otherworldly can influence us and allow us to explore ourselves in ways currently impractical in the real world. It’s a world of so many cultures, and so many influences that it’s a sandbox, and to be a reflective construction of a sandbox that aspires to be all encompassing, is to be everything therein. Rather, there are parts of identity we seem to compartmentalize in different contexts and purposes, our “bodies” are only a part of a multi-layered structure of self. 

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This Policy Proposal was written for the University of Otago in the paper GEND310 in a group effort alongside Olivia Seymour and Eilish Lie-Olesen with an expected word count of 3000 plus or minus 10% with a total of ~3232 words. There are 20 references used for this work.

Policy Writer Overview

MITIGATING THE IMPACTS OF INTERGENERATIONAL CHILD POVERTY ON FUTURE CRIMINALISATION AND VICTIMISATION

This policy proposal was written by Caleb Ewins, Olivia Seymour, and Eilish Lie-Olesen as part of a collaborative group effort.

I | PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION

The issue of child poverty is persistent and significant in New Zealand. The Child Poverty Action Group report estimates that in 2020/21, approximately 332,900 children lived in poverty after housing costs. About 236,900 children lived in income poverty, on the related 50% measure, and 150,400 children lived in severe income poverty, on the 40% or less measure (CPAG.org, 2022). Moreover, marginalised, and high-risk groups like Māori and Pasifika suffer from child poverty at a disproportionate rate than Pākeha. Māori children lived in poverty at 17.8% (52,600), while Pasifika children lived in poverty at 16.3% (23,800) (Stats NZ, 2022). Child poverty rates in New Zealand have remained largely unchanged despite the implementation of various policies and promises by the government to reduce these sobering statistics. In deliberating our policy, we have identified numerous factors contributing to the impact of child poverty relating to the intergenerational effects on children who grow up in poverty. Combined with other government-implemented policies and programs designed to prevent childhood poverty, we believe our policy can work in tandem to mitigate the consequences of child poverty on related issues such as crime.

A child who lives in poverty is much more likely to experience patterns of recurring physical and mental illness throughout their lifetime. One of the most important factors affecting health is income. Poor housing, as well as material hardships such as lack of food, warm clothes, and routine health checkups, all contribute to this problem. Moreover, children living in poverty experiencing chronic illness and material hardship are more likely to experience poor educational outcomes. A constant absence from school, inability to afford stationery, clothes, and technology are contributing factors. The cycle of poverty will continue through long term effects of long-lasting negative effects on adult health, and through poor socioeconomic outcomes from a lack of education (Poulton et al. 2002). Furthermore, in New Zealand, there is a significant relationship between poverty and future criminality and victimisation.

Criminal activity such as family violence and youth crime, is frequently fueled by poverty and economic disadvantage. An important aspect of our policy is identifying the prevalence of future criminal activity among children who are disadvantaged by poverty. It is our policy's goal to mitigate the consequences of childhood poverty on future crime for Kiwi children. As a result of the social effects of poverty, we contend that children who experience intergenerational poverty are unlikely to be surrounded by positive role models within the household. Through the implementation of our government-funded program for children who are identified as living in poverty, by providing them with one-on-one mentorship, we believe the effects of future criminalisation and victimisation can be mitigated. We should emphasise the direct effects of childhood poverty that contribute to its cyclical nature. This report will first engage with the aforementioned primary causes and impacts of childhood poverty, as well as current policies and programs in place that we find relevant to work in motion with our own at preventing poverty throughout all stages of life.

Poor Health

Rheumatic fever and poverty go hand in hand. Every week, New Zealand admits children with preventable diseases which can cause permanent damage to their hearts (We Owe It to Our Kids to Address Poor Housing, 2020). A throat infection brought on by Group A Streptococci can cause rheumatic fever. When untreated, rheumatic fever can weaken the heart valves over time, causing long-term heart damage, requiring heart surgery or can result in death (Ministry of Health, n.d.). In most developed countries, acute rheumatic fever is rare. However, in New Zealand, it is shockingly common. The rate of occurrence varies by ethnicity and geographic region. The 2018 incidence rate per 100,000 of rheumatic fever in Māori children aged 5-12 years was 32.9, in Pasifika children of the same age group it was 92.8, and in European children it was non-existent (Institute of Environmental Science and Research Ltd, 2018). Traditionally, rheumatic fever has been a disease associated with poverty: the causative factors being economic hardship and deprivation, household crowding, poor health understanding, and a lack of access to health care (Ministry of Health, n.d.). A child's access to education can be severely impacted by rheumatic fever treatment. Childhood health is a major instigator of intergenerational poverty, which can lead to future offending, with those who miss school as a child due to illness often having poor employment opportunities in adulthood as a result of a lack of education and/or long term or recurrent illness (We Owe It to Our Kids to Address Poor Housing, 2020).

The Healthy Homes Initiative

The Healthy Homes Initiative plays a pivotal role in the aim of successful primordial prevention of rheumatic fever. This is a primary method of prevention aimed at reducing child poverty and future criminality by stopping the development of risk factors associated with it. Health Homes Initiative is a government funded program established around 2013 with the goal and intention of providing affordable housing for low-income people. Specifically, this is meant to address housing issues that lead to poor health in families. Currently, the HHI is only active in some regions of the North Island (Ministry of Health, n.d.). The HHI can provide grants for insulation and a fixed heater, and includes minimum standards for heating, insulation, ventilation, moisture ingress and drainage, and draught stopping. We recognise the HHI to be a policy that is relevant to our vision in mitigating the primary risk factors that position children and families in poverty in the first instance. Thus, for the background of our report we find this important to emphasise.

Material Hardship and Poor Educational Outcomes

Material Hardship is experienced by 130,000 children in households that are regularly going without basic essentials. This would include not having enough food, warm clothes, shoes, and school essentials such as stationery and technology. Material hardship and severe material hardship is experienced at differing rates between marginalised groups such as Māori and Pasifika compared to Pākeha (Child Poverty Monitor, 2020). Implications of such tend to result in poor educational outcomes for children in poverty, whereby low-income issues such as hunger and sickness interfere with a child's ability to learn (NZEI.org, n.d). Moreover, children who live in poverty are likely to reside in low-income areas, and therefore may attend low decile schools that typically are under-resourced (Thrupp, 2008). Thus, children in poverty who attend under-resourced schools may experience material hardship and marginalisation through a lack of access to the costly digital world required in contemporary education.

The COVID-19 lockdown was able to provide the Ministry of Education with valuable insights to the extent and impact of digital exclusion when schools were required to begin distance learning (NZ Digital Government, 2021). They found that the affordability of devices and connections were a barrier to digital inclusion, and that policies need to evolve for a digital age. Issues such as material hardship within typically low socioeconomic schools, and lack of access to essentials within the household that contribute to illness and thus absence from school are identified as key causes for impoverished children’s likely poor educational outcome. An education can provide a person with a number of jobs, resources, and skills that help them not only survive, but thrive as well. By providing education, one can remedy many of the other issues that can make a person, family, and even a whole community vulnerable to poverty (Giovetti, 2022).

Breakfast in Schools Programme

Implemented programs such as ‘Kickstart Breakfast Program’ have been included as a way to alleviate the effects of child poverty to feed children in over 900 schools. This program has been co-funded by the government since 2013, and enabled students that are a part of Kickstart to have breakfast five days a week instead of prior two (Stats NZ, 2019). Child poverty experts estimate, however, that one in 10 children still live without basic necessities like food, clothes, heat, and shelter (Wade, 2022).

Family Violence, Poverty & Crime

Tens of thousands of children in New Zealand are growing up with violence present in their homes. Being exposed to family violence has a severe physical, emotional, and developmental impact on children, alongside the normalising of violence (Walker, 2017). Children learn strategies for dealing with conflict within the family unit and there is a distinct link between children who experience family violence and youth offending. Ben Hannifin, director of the Youth Justice System Development at Oranga Tamariki, said that of the young offenders Oranga Tamariki worked with, 80% had been the victim of family violence (Doyle, 2022). Often these children are affected by a range of factors – including high levels of deprivation (Walker, 2017). In extension to this, there is ample evidence that suggests individuals who experienced poverty growing up display higher levels of antisocial behaviours such as theft, vandalism, and assault than those who were not exposed to poverty in childhood (Fergusson et al., 2004; Jarjoura et al., 2002; RNZ News, 2018). This places children growing up experiencing violence within the home and poverty at a higher risk of offending.

Issues with the current PRM Child Risk Assessment

Considering means to address deficits in child welfare that lead to poor livelihood conditions, there in fact have been efforts that unfortunately are insufficient on a case-by-case basis. The reason for this is there are problems that extend beyond the scope of general poverty reduction in child-bearing families that further damage the welfare of children that are underrepresented and underappreciated. One major challenge of using computerised risk-assessment though comes in the form of managing the reliance of said tools and actual reliability of the data collection. A big issue purported by Dare et al (2014) discusses not only problems regarding overarching reliance on automated predictive data-driven tools provided and managed by health care systems but also the patterns of poverty running parallel to ill-health in many different sectors from physical to mental and general welfare. These systems generally aim to inform practitioners when to intervene potentially at risk individuals but one of the problems with this model are highlighted by Gillingham, (2016):

- It has the potential to stigmatise groups and individuals.
- Computer based risk assessment can be prone to error and not wise to more nuanced situations and problems.
- Over reliance by the practitioner may result in miss-use and poor algorithmic training of the risk assessment system
- Reliance on data that may not always be readily available for invisible cases.

There are some ways this still has merit though, as identifying problems and patterns using computerised technology still can help in identifying groups and communities with prevalent issues that are potentially addressable.

Our Vision

As a whole, eliminating childhood poverty is undeniably our end goal. Child poverty is an appalling reality, and we believe that future issues contributing to child poverty can be mitigated in conjunction with existing policies that address direct risk factors related to poverty. Thus, our end goal for our policy is to implement the current not-for-profit programme ‘Big Brothers, Big Sisters of New Zealand Tuakana Teina’, as a government funded programme that will provide children living in poverty that meet our accurate and contemporary ‘Tuakana Teina Child Risk Assessment’, with a one-on-one mentor. It is our vision to reduce the prevalence of criminalisation and victimisation among children who grow up in poverty. The issue posited can be illustrated by the aforementioned statistics, confirming the desperate need for an effective youth mentoring program to prevent poverty's inextricable link to crime. The harsh reality is that poverty-stricken children are more likely to have witnessed substance abuse, crime, and familial violence, resulting in increased chances of offending themselves as adults. In order to alleviate the cyclical effects of poverty and crime, we believe that a positive role model outside the family paired with an at-risk child can reduce the likelihood of poverty-related crime in the future.

II | OVERVIEW

We are proposing that the government should fund the youth mentoring program ‘Big Brothers, Big Sisters of New Zealand, Tuakana Teina’, making it free and available for children who are identified as living in poverty, and compulsory for children who have been exposed to family violence, substance abuse or begin displaying behaviours as such. It is our goal to implement this policy so that, in turn, it will mitigate the effects of poverty on crime alongside existing prevention policies aimed at eradicating poverty through mitigating primary risk factors. As it stands, there are no current government funded mentorship programmes for at risk children living in poverty. Currently BBBSNZ is a not-for-profit organisation that provides youth mentoring nationally in New Zealand.

We believe that our goal and values of reducing future criminality among youth in poverty aligns with BBBSNZ’s vision of igniting youth potential. Their mahi (work) in providing children with one-on-one mentorship’s aims to help build positive relationships that are critical to childhood development (BBBSNZ, org, n.d). Furthermore, the mentoring model they employ has a meaningful, positive and lasting impact on the lives of young people who face a variety of societal and personal barriers to success. As evidenced by their tremendous success and reviews from mentees on their website, their ethos emphasises the importance of caring adults' role of keeping at-risk children out of trouble. For us, we believe that this will impact at-risk children from backgrounds of poverty who may not have a caring adult or positive role model in their lives, or children who have been exposed to violence or substance abuse. By providing children with a positive role model and mentor, BBBSNZ contend their success through the subsequent statistics: Compared to non-mentored youth; (BBBSNZ.org)

- 98% of BBBSNZ young mentees; believe they are making betters life choices
- 96% report being happier with a positive outlook, 87% report having stronger social networks
- 77% reports being better at expressing their feelings
- 84% improved their relationships with adults
- 76% improved their attitude towards school
- 91% improved in their self confidence
- 85% improved their trust toward their mentor
- 87% report having stronger social networks

III | POLICY FORMULATION

BBBSNZ is an already well established programme providing thousands of mentees with one-on-one mentorships. Currently, it is not-for-profit, meaning that they rely solely on donations and funding from their partners. With government funding, and the undoubtable interest of stakeholders such as Oranga Tamariki and The Ministry of Education, it has the ability to serve as a huge stepping-stone in mitigating the impact of future criminality committed by children in poverty. As a result of our policy, BBBSNZ will be able to provide thousands more mentors if it becomes government-funded. Furthermore, if it were fully funded by the government, we may be able to create more training programs for mentors, as well as employ more mentors that can support and match prospective mentees from diverse cultural backgrounds. This is crucial to our ethos, as disadvantaged children tend to come from marginalised groups, such as Māori or Pasifika. Our program values cultural competence due to the demographics of children in poverty, and seeks to provide appropriate training for our mentors.

IV | OUR PRINCIPLES

Principle 1

To start, in order to act in favour of families facing problems like these, the first goal is to make the program readily available in the form of applying. This application system can draw from already available beneficiary data and add applicants to a repository based on location, identity, health and financial circumstance. Using patterns of marginalised groups, we can use a risk assessment system only to highlight cases for case managers to progress clients.

Our aim ultimately is to implement a risk assessment program that is designed to draw from data from both medical institutions as well as legal institutions in respect to intergenerational history of poverty, events of drug use, violence, and ill-health. These data points will be used to serve as markers to measure individuals by risk. We believe many people will automatically qualify for intervention by our initiative due to their extreme circumstance but to combat error of fringe and middle-ground cases should be handed over to a case manager to overview as to allow for judgement by a qualified assessor.

Fortunately, New Zealand already utilises risk assessment systems in some policy initiatives and sectors and expectantly this will result in this principle acquiring many funds for development and repurposing towards this sort of subject as opposed to uses in only health sectors.

Principle 2

The second principle this policy will operate by focuses on the context of case managers that handle cases deemed unmanageable by the risk assessment system of principle 1. Judgement by an official is crucial to a fair and just assessment of oncoming registers to the mentorship system. Of course, one of the proposals we’d like to put forward is the ability to change from a concurrent case manager, and absolutist confidentiality in the discussion of individual circumstances. The case manager ultimately will have the say in how to manage the case and run it through the risk assessment system of principle 1 as a means of adding constitutive contexts and elements to enhance the effectiveness of the risk assessment system in nuances previously unacknowledged. However, This idealistic algorithmic training is not meant to overhaul the role of operators of the second principle, but to further capacities for identifying risky groups.

Principle 3

The last principle focuses on the activity of the policy. With individuals that are marked for intervention either by principle 1 or 2, we approach the family of the individual of concern with the proposal of a mentor. Mentor’s will be selected to cater for individuals of different cultural and relevant backgrounds and function as a means to guide, assist, and assess their case through regular visits via available centres the mentors can operate out of. These centres include:

- School grounds
- Health Centres
- And community outreach centres

Generally we want the mentors to be able to effectively act and operate as necessary in these and more accessible sectors fit for their operation in the interest of safety and cohesion for the mentored individuals. It is important to recognise this likely will make up the bulk in which funding will be going into, especially in the vetting and training process to form a mentor as well as find individuals willing to be readily available for the mentorship responsibility in this policy process.

V | STAKEHOLDERS

The impacts of family violence, substance abuse, and poverty on children are far reaching, with those exposed to deprivation and/or violence more likely to commit crime later in life. This report aims to provide support for at-risk children and ignite their potential by providing positive role models and mentors, and simultaneously mitigate the effects of poverty and violence on offending. Therefore:

This policy intends to work alongside BBBSNZ, a not-for-profit organisation that provides youth with mentoring services in New Zealand.
It also intends to work in tandem with Oranga Tamariki, the Ministry for Children, and their existing policies for providing at-risk children with support. It will also revise their existing Child Risk Assessment systems.
Finally, this policy will work closely with the Ministry of Education to ensure teacher and school guidance counsellors are provided with the resources needed to identify at-risk children.

By working alongside these stakeholders, this policy will be able to provide at-risk children with positive mentors and mitigate the influence of family violence and poverty has on the potential for future offending.

References

Boston, J. (2014). Child Poverty in New Zealand: Why it matters and how it can be reduced. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(9), 962–988. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2014.931002
Dare, T., Vaithianathan, R., & De Haan, I. (2014). Addressing Child Maltreatment in New Zealand: Is Poverty Reduction Enough? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(9), 989–994. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2014.938450
Doyle, K. (2022, April 29). Is youth crime really a growing problem and what can be done about it? Stuff. https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/300576087/is-youth-crime-really-a-growing-problem-and-what-can-be-done-about-it
Gillingham, P. (2016). Predictive Risk Modelling to Prevent Child Maltreatment: Insights and Implications from Aotearoa/New Zealand. Journal of Public Child Welfare, 11(2), 150–165. https://doi.org/10.1080/15548732.2016.1255697
Fergusson, D., Swain-Campbell, N., & Horwood, J. (2004). How does childhood economic disadvantage lead to crime? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45(5), 956–966. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.t01-1-00288.x
Giovetti, O. (2022). How does education affect poverty? It can help end it. [online] Concern Worldwide. Available at: https://www.concernusa.org/story/how-does-education-affect-poverty/.
Institute of Environmental Science and Research Ltd. (2018). Rheumatic Fever Report. https://surv.esr.cri.nz/PDF_surveillance/RheumaticFever/Rheumaticfeverbi-annualreportJan-Dec2018.pdf
Jarjoura, G. R., Triplett, R. A., & Brinker, G. P. (2002). Growing Up Poor: Examining the Link Between Persistent Childhood Poverty and Delinquency. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 18(2), 159–187. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1015206715838
Ministry of Health. (n.d.). Healthy Homes Initiative. Ministry of Health NZ. https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/preventative-health-wellness/healthy-homes-initiative
Ministry of Health. (n.d.). Rheumatic fever. Ministry of Health NZ. https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/communicable-disease-control-manual/rheumatic-fever
nzei.org.nz. (n.d.). Poverty still affecting children’s education. [online] Available at: https://nzei.org.nz/NZEI/Media/Releases/2018/11/Poverty_still_affecting_children_s_education.aspx.
Poulton, R., Caspi, A., Milne, B.J., Thomson, W.M., Taylor, A., Sears, M.R. and Moffitt, T.E. (2002). Association between children’s experience of socioeconomic disadvantage and adult health: a life-course study. Lancet, [online] 360(9346), pp.1640–1645. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(02)11602-3.
RNZ News. (2018, December). Children born into poverty more likely to become criminals. RNZ; RNZ. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/377246/children-born-into-poverty-more-likely-to-become-criminals
Shackleton, N., Li, E., Gibb, S., Kvalsvig, A., Baker, M., Sporle, A., Bentley, R., & Milne, B. J. (2021a). The relationship between income poverty and child hospitalisations in New Zealand: Evidence from longitudinal household panel data and Census data. PLOS ONE, 16(1), e0243920. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243920
Shackleton, N., Li, E., Gibb, S., Kvalsvig, A., Baker, M., Sporle, A., Bentley, R., & Milne, B. J. (2021b). The relationship between income poverty and child hospitalisations in New Zealand: Evidence from longitudinal household panel data and Census data. PLOS ONE, 16(1), e0243920. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0243920
Warin, B., & Ghazali, S. (2014). Child Poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand and around the “developed” world. New Zealand Medical Student Journal, 29-31. https://web-s-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.otago.ac.nz/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=7096032d-30bf-4a38-b298-9ed454e10ceb%40redis
Walker, J. (2017, September 27). When the Vulnerable offend — whose fault is it? | The District Court of New Zealand. Www.districtcourts.govt.nz. https://www.districtcourts.govt.nz/youth-court/publications/when-the-vulnerable-offend-whose-fault-is-it/
We owe it to our kids to address poor housing. (2020, August 20). Www.rnzcgp.org.nz. https://www.rnzcgp.org.nz/GPPulse/GPPulse/Clinical_news/2020/We_owe_it_to_our_kids_to_address_poor_housing.aspx#:~:text=Traditionally%20rheumatic%20fever%20has%20been
www.bigbrothersbigsisters.org.nz. (n.d.). Quality Youth Mentoring, that works with Big Brothers Big Sisters NZ. [online] Available at: https://www.bigbrothersbigsisters.org.nz/ [Accessed 1 Jun. 2022].
www.cpag.org.nz. (2022). Latest child poverty figures • Child Poverty Action Group. [online] Available at: https://www.cpag.org.nz/the-latest/current-statistics/latest-child-poverty-figures/.

This Policy Proposal was written for the University of Otago in the paper GEND310 in a group effort alongside Olivia Seymour and Eilish Lie-Olesen with an expected word count of 700 plus or minus 10% with a total of ~7099 words. There are 23 references used for this work.

Estonia and Finland are two neighbouring European countries that are separated only by a body of water and the border of Russia. Estonia is more central to Europe but is notably one of the three Baltic states whereas Finland is in Scandinavia. The two countries both share many similarities both geographically and culturally as the Finnish language is largely related to the Estonia language, they both are also registered countries under the European Union. The two countries are particularly close in their trade and relations, often supporting each other in the form of military aid and acting as major exports for each other in goods and services.

The reason why these two countries are so interesting is the similarities they do share, also highlight some major disparities in part to population changes over time in response to events the two countries handled or endured much differently one most notably being the annexation of Estonia and neighbouring Finnish war by the at the time hostile and now-defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

According to (nationsonline.org, n.d.) Estonia is considered a second-world country having been part of the communist-socialist states but remains uninfluenced by the west. Finland comparatively despite the geographical proximity is not, and instead considered a first-world country as part of their strong western influences.

To describe an explanation and negotiate the demographical trends of the two countries, this report aims to utilise the demographic transition theory developed by Kirk (1996). Using this demographical model, it should be possible to design a stable prediction of the country's potential growth or decline thereof based on the country’s development concerning lifespan, and fertility, albeit except for migration trends. This is important, as the incapacity to identify population trends and reasons for them, is key to the appreciation and action against key forces that affect a country, and such population effects can have serious effects on the stability, economy, and power of the country. Hence why the countries Finland and Estonia have been chosen, two similar countries in both geography and neighbours, but a vastly different history and handling of events that have affected both countries. One key idea of demographic transition theory is the stages in which a country transitions. Countries with small populations generally have high death rates and birth rates, but as life expectancy increases and fewer deaths occur, birth rates eventually follow and plummet to a “replacement rate”. Generally, as a result, larger populations have stable death and birth rates which results in a second demographic transition in which the population is not increasing but possibly slowly decreasing (Grover 2014).

Population Change

The following graph (See Figure 1) was obtained from Statistics Finland (2022) which is a website that is continuously updated with population data of Finland over the years. The populational data obtained draws out from the whole Finnish population regardless of individual characteristics like age and gender.

With how far back Figure 1 goes, it can account for events of turmoil such as the Finnish war, the Cholera Epidemic, Famines, and more. The data shows the population from 0 to 6,000,000 individuals of the population on the Y-axis, and on the X-axis is the data for the passage of time in years from 1700 to 2050. As it stands, the oldest data point is 1749 with a total population of 410,400. Overall, until 2020, it has gained 5,123,393 in population to a total of 5,533,793 completely over the course of 273 years. This increase in population over time has been met steadily and linearly, there are small divots along with this population change but none that severely affected the increase in the population. Only until the 1900s has the population increase rate begun to flatten a bit more indicating for future no major increases or decreases in population.

Figure 2 is a graph of the same nature as Figure 1 except, it is instead a source from Statistics Estonia from the whole population again regardless of individual characteristics of age and gender (Statistics Estonia, 2022). On the graph, the Y-axis reads the total population from 0 to 1,800,000 individuals and the X-axis records the passage of time in the years from 1919 to 2022. Since about 1919 Estonias population had increase by 259,095 from a starting data point of 1,069,344 in 1919 to 1,328,439 in 2022. There are a few features worthy of note on the Estonian graph however, firstly, there is a deficit of data between the years 1940 and 1950. There isn’t much of note before the year 1950 but since 1950 there is an observable linear increase in population until around 1988 when the population very steadily decreases flattening out around the year 2000 indicating no major increases or decreasing in population for the coming years.

Comparing the two countries, immediately evident is the difference in population sizes with Estonia being approximately a fifth of the total population of Finland as of the current day. Also, there is more available data on Finland than there is on Estonia.

Lifespan

Lifespan generally refers to the length of time, typically measured in years that is estimated although not expected for an individual or individuals to live in a place. This, however, is a very nuanced variable to measure because people may not always be in the same place, and experience differs based on personal circumstances like socio-economic status, epidemics, and wars, among many other factors. As a result, there is a possibility to notice changes in life expectancy in a country during a point in time that was reducing the life expectancy of the country's population, but this will not be representative of all population units. Note that life expectancy is only a snapshot and therefore not an accurate depiction of the exact expected length of life of individuals in these countries but rather an average and estimate for the period, as these snapshots only draw from the higher mortality rates of specific aged groups which is strongly subjected to concurrent world circumstance.

Graphical Overview

The following data is sourced by OurWorldInData.com which sources its life expectancy data from reports in 2019 by the UN Populations Division as well as from the information from 2015 from Clio Infra Database and an article on life expectancy estimations by James C. Riley in 2005. On the graph, the data points are the position representations of concurrent life expectancy across the period of about 220 years comparing Estonia to Finland. The Y-axis is the number of years expected, and on the X-axis, are the years starting from 1795 to 2019 including all data on life expectancy years throughout those years. Beginning with Finland the following features are important to note:

• Life expectancy reportedly around the early 1800s is slightly lower than 40 years
• Fluctuations of life expectancy occur around 1870 through to 1950 constantly going up and down.
• Larger although short-lived jumps and dips in life expectancy occurred from 1795 to 1875.
• Since the 1950s, life expectancy has been linearly rising without noise.
• Finland peaks in life expectancy at its more recent data point in 2019 a bit over 80 years.
• Overall Finland has increased life expectancy from less than 40 to greater than 80 years. The increase was mostly non-linearly starting notably in 1875.

With Estonia, the following features are important to note:

• Estonia only started collecting data on life expectancy around the 1900s
• The country’s largest jump in life expectancy occurred in the 1950s.
• After the 1950s, life expectancy flattens and doesn’t change majorly until around the 1980s.
• Estonia peaks in its life expectancy at its most recent data point in 2019 just under 80 years.
• Data points of Estonian life expectancy aren’t consistent, there are some gaps in yearly reports.

Comparing the two countries, Finland has significantly more data than Estonia. For the country’s life expectancy though, Finland has fared better overall with a higher life expectancy than Estonia but its historical data from the 1870s to 1950s was much more turbulent. Overall though, they’ve both progressed in lengthening their life expectancies nearly matching each other along the way.

Population Pyramids

In addition to general lifespan estimates of the two countries, a useful tool to additionally employ to understand these populations are their population pyramid models. These pyramids are measurements of the total population of people based on their respective gender and age group that goes in increments of 5 years. The total outcome therefore of the pyramids should be 100% when all the values are added to reflect the whole population of the country. One feature worth noting on the pyramids as well as the invisible divide of population responsibilities. Children (ages of 0 to around 19) at the lowest rungs of the graph are representative of the next generation of younger people. But the current generation of younger people (Age of 20 to around 39) reproduces and works to generate a population of children. Elderly groups are generally not reproducing, and even older groups are potentially retiring and therefore have little effect on the lower populations, but once the elderly population is exhausted, we will see shifts in the total population of the respective country. Therefore, large numbers of children indicate for the population increases as younger people are reproducing more. However, more younger people do not necessarily mean there will be an increase in population for a variety of possible personal reasons (Department of Health, Pennsylvania n.d.). 

Graphical Overview

The population pyramids are sourced from populationpyramid.net which obtains their data from primarily the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and its population division to derive their population pyramids numbers. On the population pyramids, the Y-axis accounts for age groups in increments of 4 years. On the X-Axis, the percentage by which those age groups make up the population is noted. Lastly, of note, the graph is split into two categorical brackets male (on the left) and female (on the right) The population pyramid of Finland has the following features:

• The pyramid’s shape is akin to a tower with its top quarter petering off in population numbers.
• All the population from ages 0 to 74 are all roughly in the 2.5 to 3.3% in population makeup. This means there are about as many children in the population as there are reproductive adults and some elderly groups.
• Because the pyramidal shape only begins at the top of the graph, there isn’t a major reproductive push for children and therefore, not a great increase in population-based on births.

The population pyramid of Estonia has the following features:

• The pyramids shape is tower-shaped but crooked in the lower age rubrics from ages 0 to 24.
• Because the pyramidal shape begins only at the top quarter of the tower, there doesn’t seem to be a major push for reproduction to grow the population.
• Notably, because the populations of younger people below the age bracket for reproductive individuals are fewer, the following generation will have fewer individuals to make up the reproductive bracket and therefore generally fewer children will be had until a push is made.
• The women bracket notably seems to make up more of the elderly population and therefore live longer than male elderly people in age brackets over 70 years old

The two graphs are very similar in shape following the same stationary pattern, although Estonia’s younger age brackets are thinner than the more bulkier reproductive age and elderly age brackets. Of the two graphs as population pyramids as well, they both have a appropriate equal male to female ratio across the brackets.

Child Mortality

Of the child mortality graph, the graph is sourced by OurWorldInData.org which found their data by estimates by interpolated demographic indicators. The Y-axis of the graph accounts for the number of deaths of children (individuals that are under five years of age) per 1000 live births by the individuals whereas the X-axis accounts for the change in the number of child deaths over time in years from 1960 to 2020.

On Finland’s data points:

• Finland has the earliest data of the two countries from 1960.
• Since the 1960s, Finland was one a sharp rapid decline in the number of child moralities until petering off in the 1980s.
• Since the 1990s, Finland’s number of child deaths has slowly been decreasing more and more but much more slowly than before.

On Estonia’s data points:

• Estonia’s earliest data point occurs around 1985 just below 500 child moralities a year.
• Estonia similarly to Finland after the 1990s has been steadily decreasing in number of children moralities reaching numbers as low as 200 and lower

Comparatively between the two countries in respect to child mortality, Estonia appears to have smaller child mortality than Finland although this is probably likely due to the major differences in population between the two countries. Unfortunately, data from Estonia doesn’t date as well as Finland’s data points and only the pattern from the 1990s onwards is indicative of similar child morality changes.

Explanation

This change in child morality can be seen in figure 5 as both countries with time and development have eleviated this problem and in conjunction life expectancy has gone up. Therefore there is less urgency for a need for children and henceforth population increases will become smaller until an eventual shift into decreases. As demonstrated on the population pyramids this is very evident.

Demographic transition theory may be applied in these contexts to explain some features of the population changes in the two countries. As time has gone by, the lifespan of the countries has increased near to double than in was much further ago. With this increased life expectancy though, a common trend with this is improved capacity for survival in the population. During times where survival is difficult and life expectancy is small, reproductive adults tend to have more children as a kind of “backup” as generally in times with lower life expectancy, accessibility to health, wealth, among other necessities key to quality of life are much lower leading to more mortalities especially of children. In Nordic studies looking into the life-backgrounds, there are trends in the countries including Finland that show through policy, the life expectancy of already advantaged groups concentrate in lengthier mortality brackets, but this contrasts to the much smaller changes in the lower socio-economic parts of society in regard to early deaths. Largely this is a product of wealth, and the impact on health and disease that mirror each other on both socio-economic quartiles of the poor and the rich. Regardless, inequalities do exist, and the impact on them are identifiable on Figure 4 as Finlands population in elderly age brackets beyond reproductive age especially is widened (Brønnum-Hansen et al. 2021). Other ways life expectancy has supposedly increased is through the implementation of policy that allow for earlier retirement and appropriate pensions in multiple countries including Finland and Estonia, although, this does again draw on the equalities posed in both countries in from different socio-economic brackets (Alvarez, Kallestrup-Lamb & Kjærgaard 2021). With this in mind though, we can see how life expectancy has increase, but also realise why Figure 5 indicates for fewer child mortalities, as early deaths are prevented with assistive policy.

As Kirk (1996) describes a trend in populations, that in those with lower life expectancies tend to have lower fertility rates than that of populations with high life expectancies. These fertility rates will be discussed in the followup section but this outlines a specific relationship with how the lifespans of both Finland and Estonia may have afflicted the changes in population, and especially with the data from Figure 5, evidently, the risk of death in infants is much reduced in 1990 onwards compared to years prior. Ultimately in both countries then, the indication of where the two countries lie in the demographic transition theory model, is where deathrates have begun to stabilise. Therefore, its possible Finland and Estonia are in their stabilisation phase and about to move on to a steady population decrease but not because death rates are increasing. Although, one this worthwhile noting is in this evaluation in the context of Estonia, this report has ignored the population decline after the 1990s and the reason for this is the decline is not necessarily are product of lifespan or births but rather a large population migration which will be outlined in the migration section.

Fertility

Total fertility rate or TFR referred to the approximate average number of children that a woman would have given birth to during their lifetime. TFRs only apply, however, when the woman in question met the age-specific fertility rate and successfully survive from their birth to the end of their reproductive life.

Graphical Overview

The following graph showcases the total fertility rate of women from 1800 to 2017 across the two countries of Finland and Estonia. The Y-axis of the graph accounts for the number of children a woman on average would have according to TFR guidelines and the X-Axis accounts for the passage of time in years from 1800 to 2017. The data used in the graph was obtained by OurWorldInData.org which sourced the information from a datasheet report published by Gapminder which uses data from UN estimates from the world population prospects of 2017, as well as UN fertility rate forecasts across all countries and some data documented by Mattias Lindgren (Gapminder 2019).

The Finland data on the graph has the following features:

• There is an overall change in TFR reducing in numbers from 1800 to 2017
• The peak data points go a bit higher than 5 children per woman. The lowest and more recent data points are just under two children per woman.
• Decreases in Finland's fertility rate first plummet in the 1900s until flattened out around the 1930s.
• There is a sudden rise in the fertility rate in the 1950s until again dropped down in the 1970s onwards.
• Datapoints over the years are usually pretty turbulent.

The Estonia data on the graph has the following features:

• Estonia's data points make up a smoother data presentation than Finland
• The data for Estonia's child per woman peak at over 5 children in the 1800s and overall decreases to just beneath 2 children per woman.
• The TFR of Estonia after the 1850s begin decreasing before a sharp decline in the 1900s flattening out around the 1920s.
• Estonia saw one additionally sudden jump and dip fluctuation in TFR around 1990.

Comparatively to Finland's data, Estonia's data is much more smooth and less erratic. It appears the changes to TFR for Finland were much more sudden and quicker than in Estonia, but Estonia almost always was lower than Finland in TFR anyways.

Fertility Rates vs Life Expectancy

The two graphs below aim to highlight an explanation of the sharp decreases in fertility rates by comparing them to the life expectancy of the time. These were also sourced by Gapminder (Gapminder 2019). According to Demographic Transition Theory, there are five stages by which a pattern can be derived and provide some explanation as to why the pattern exists. In Finland for instance, early on the life expectancy of the country was within the age margins of 45-50 years. In more recent times, Finland has reached a life expectancy in the age margins of 70-90 years. Relative to Demographic Transition Theory, Finland's population in the modern-day must be in its third stage of development, in which the population is still increasing but only marginally as people don’t need to have many children. The population of Finland is beginning to stabilize and with the increased life expectancy, there has been a shift from a need for many children to a reduced number of children because birth control is accessible, and women have more opportunities than previously. Historically over time, expenses for a living have increased and the overall mortality of children has decreased over the years.

Estonia is largely the same as Finland in their life expectancy for babies per woman, but compared to its populational graph, therein lies a problem with Demographic Transition Theory in that it doesn’t consider variables of migration which is pivotal to the larger population changes as will be highlighted in the migration segment. Although ignoring the major population dip of Estonia that is attributable to migration, in applying the Demographic Transition Theory, Estonia seems to be evening out in birth rates against death rates indicating it may be in the fourth stage of transitioning as the population stabilises.

In each of the graphs, they show the in percentages of women married compared to all women who have an unmet need for contraceptive options. This is measured by the UNFPA which gathers this data in terms of the percentage of populations from the countries and territories the UNFPA operate under. This data is publicly available under their world population dashboard.

Estonia’s family planning data has the following features:

• Approximately 56% of women in Estonia use contraception of any kind and 51% of the population use modern forms of contraception.
• 65% of married or union women use any kind of contraception but 58% of them use modern methods of contraception

• Out of unmet needs, only 7% of women in Estonia have their contraceptive needs unmet with married women being about 11%
• There is a proportion of demand of about 80% of women aged 15-49.

Finland’s family planning data has the following features:

• Approximately 79% of women in Finland use contraception of any kind and 74% of the population use modern forms of contraception.
• 82% of married or union women use any kind of contraception but 77% of them use modern methods of contraception
• Out of unmet needs, only 3% of women in Finland have their contraceptive needs unmet with married women being about 5%
• There is a proportion of demand of about 90% of women aged 15-49.

This draws into some interesting notes about changes in contraceptive use. As well to women having fewer children in both countries, there is a notable presence of use in contraception in the country for women aged 15-49 years. This reinforces the idea that because life expectancy is much higher, and because there is a lesser need for having more children, the female population in these countries aren’t having as many with contraception being on the prescriptions, they’re using to prevent future potentially pregnancies and in turn reduce how many children they’re having.

Explanation

With respect to Estonia, during the reductions in fertility rate after the 1900s, there was much deliberation from 1920 to 1939 on the expectations and traditions of the male and female roles in the country. This extended especially to the reproductive habits of women in the country, as historically methods of contraception have been complicated in their accessibility and practicality to Estonias women. Additionally, most policy and politicians expressed concerns over women tanking the population as their duty was to have kids. Despite this, options such as condoms were widely publicized in the media, and controversy on the topic of abortion and infanticide was common as women wanted to better control their family size (Tammeveski, 2011). Feminist discussions also highlight a key point in Estonia’s reproductive rights history, where prior to the dissolution of the USSR the state had control of what was available to Estonian women, and notably allowed for abortion processes but disallowed contraception. Years late a post-soviet Estonia then began to transition away from abortive practices and more so into greater sex education and better access to contraception options which reportedly satisfied the needs of the time (Oja 2017). Comparatively to figure 9. This transition to modern contraceptive methods is still yet to come fully to fruition prevalence-wise. Generally, only a very small parts of Estonian women have unmet needs for their contraception.

In Finland, contraceptive use was a controversial one, and over the years have moved from what was a eugenics-based sterilization program to a contraceptive basis used today. Some time around 1937 and 1950 came the introduction to Finnish society family planning which would primarily sterilize participants, in families, some sought to control their fertility but the sterilization thing caught much ire under the guise of common classed topics like abortion. Sometime around 1960 contraception became more accepted and clashes on abortion had mostly diluted (Hemminki, Rasimus & Forssas 1997). Comparatively to Figure 9, Finland’s contraceptive family planning regime seems to account for many women and given the rise in popularity of conception around this time, after 1900 when fertility rates began to decrease, it's possible this is where this desire to control fertility came about. In addition to this, Finland historically has been very progressive inequality between the genders, women of Finland are generally not put in a position where they must conform to “traditional” gender roles, but also work and act outside the responsibilities of traditional childbearing. Importantly though, this equality is not what is decreasing fertility rates though but rather the equal involvement of both mother and father in the childbearing role. (Hellstrand, Nisén & Myrskylä 2020).

Taking all of this into account, relative to demographic transition theory ese reasons and trends of fertility highlighted by these two countries can reflect their growth and population patterns of them. Generally, when the life expectancy goes up because the death rate of a country lowers, as does the birth rate over time. Considering this in conjunction with the better access to fertility control and country sentiments, people of Estonia and Finland are having much less child than before, although with some government push to incite increases in fertility. To put, women have more options, the cost of living is varied, there is less urgency to have children. Usually what happens in fertility studies, is fertility rates reflect a kind of “replacement” system that competes alongside the death rate of the time hence the smaller risk warrants fewer children. So on the Estonia and Finland graphs, the reason why birth rates were so high, is because of this directly, and they’ve both mostly flattened out as the populations begin to stabilise eventually set to either not change and possibly decrease in population with time (Kirk 1996).

Migration

Migration in the demography of these two countries is incredibly important in the explanation of some of the changes in the overall population over the last few decades. All the following figures were sourced directly from OurWorldinData.org which uses data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA). The data used include the net migration, net migration rate, total number of immigrants as well as emigrants of both Estonia and Finland.

International Immigrants Graphical Overview

Estonia’s migratory graph on international immigrants has the following features:

• Estonia has been on a steady decline from 350,000+ in 1990 to 200,000 in 2021 immigrants a year.
• Since around 2015, the number of immigrants appears to have flattened out.
• The shape of Estonia's immigration pattern is curved downwards.

Finland’s migratory graph on international immigrants has the following features:

• Finland's immigration number has been on a steady increase from about 50,000 in 1990 to 350,000+ in 2020.
• The shape of Finland's immigration patterns as graphed is linear.

In contrast, Finland on the graph they have a linear gain from about 50,000 from 1990 to 350,000+ in 2020 clearly showing greater numbers than Estonia as the number of immigrants in their country has been increasing instead of decreasing therefore meaning more people of foreign origin are coming into Finland compared to Estonia.

International Emigrants Graphical Overview

Estonia’s migratory graph on international emigrants has the following features:

• Estonia has overall had an increase of emigrants from just over 100,000 in 1990 to just over 200,000 in 2020.
• Estonia has mostly been increasing in a linear shape. The largest increase in emigrants appears after 2010.

Finland’s migratory graph on international emigrants has the following features:

• Finland has overall had an increase of emigrants from 250,000 in 1990 to over 300,000 emigrants in 2020.
• Finland increased to over 300,000 emigrants in 2000 before declining partially down to about 275,000 in 2015. This thereafter changed into 2020 with an increase in emigrants.

Comparatively, there isn’t much difference in the graph other than the amount of emigrant’s total. Their patterns both involve minor increases but are mostly steady going as so indicating a steady increase in the number of people leaving the countries. However Finland did decrease in the number of emigrants from 2000 until 2015, but this decrease was very small and quickly made back those decreases by 2020.  

Graphical Overview

It is at the net migration graph is where things get interesting as it is calculated by the number of immigrants minus the number of emigrants to determine the net gain or loss of population because of migration. Estonia’s net migration data on the graph has the following features:

• The net migration was approximately +40,000 individuals to begin with but has overall decreased to about +20,000 individuals in net migration
• From the years 1955 to 1990 the net migration was mostly stable with no major increase or decrease
• After 1990 Estonia saw a major decrease in the net migration as low as -100,000. This bounced back to about 0 in net migration in 1995 and lowered again in 2000 to about -20,000 individuals until 2020 when net migration became positive in numbers at about +20,000.

Finland’s net migration data on the graph has the following features:

• Finland in 1955 has been increasing in net migration to the present day.
• Finland in around the 1960s saw a large dip in net migration to about -100,000 until an increase up to +25,000, another dip in 1980 to about -25,000 followed by another increase to again +25,000.
• The journey of Finland's net migration has been very unsettled constantly between years having increases and decreased, but overall been increasing.

Graphical Overview

Lastly of the migratory graphs is the net migration rate, this graph is different from other graphs in its function. In this graph, the X-axis is still measuring in years but on the Y-Axis, this is the number of immigrants – the number of emigrants over the last five years divided by the person-years lived by the population of the receiving country over that period. The numbers are expressed as an average annual net number of migrants per 1000.

Estonia’s net migration rate data on the graph has the following features:

• Since 1955, the rate has overall decreased from about +6 to +4 in 2020.
• Estonia from 1955 to 1990 has mostly been on a semi-linear line to +3.
• After 1990, Estonia saw a major decrease in net migration to lower than -10 in 1995 before bouncing back to 0 in 2000.
• In 2005, Estonia was at about -3 in net migration and recovered from this point after 2015 to +4.

Finland’s net migration rate data on the graph has the following features:

• Since 1955, the migration rate of Finland has overall increased from -1 to about +3 in 2020
• Finland’s data shape is that of a new noisy linear line.
• Finland’s lowest speaking is almost as low as -5 in 1970. Since 1980, Finland hasn’t had a negative net migration rate number.

Compared to Estonia, this is a juxtaposition as Estonia has been massively declining where it was formerly increasing and only recently recovered. Finland has just been steadily increasing with no major notable features that make nearly as large a clause for concern as Estonia.  

Explanation

I want to focus on migration stock of the percentage of the country's population that is foreign-born using the total number of international immigrants. The data is measured by population (Y) against years (X) and sources by the UN DESA and complied by OurWorldInData.

Estonia is an interesting case, because as noted in their emigrational data, after the 1990s a major increase in emigrants and in addition a major decrease in total population can be seen. What’s worthy of note here is the timing of this increase and decrease as the fall of the USSR occurred around 1990 and so, thereafter many of the foreign population from the USSR might be leaving Estonia which was annexed by the USSR back in the 1940s. As a result, the population of immigrants in Estonia has greatly decreased overall by about 200,000 approx which can be seen in Figure 12 as net migration over five years plummets after the 1990s (Kulu & Tammaru 2000). As it stands now according to the OECD Library (2021) in 2020 approximately 14.9% of the Estonia population were foreign to their country of birth, particularly coming from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. It is as they claim, that in terms of long-term immigration, most of Estonia’s permitted immigrants are in-country for Family, Work, and Studies.

Estonia’s Emigration has since flattened out and is less of growing concern but does outline many stock migration relocation from Estonia to elsewhere. What might be worth considering in conjunction with this, is how that reflects current-day concerns concerning nearby ongoing conflicts that may influence the future of emigration and immigration of Estonia given the claim that Russia’s efforts on warring with one prior soviet country Ukraine are to restore and reclaim Russian land and restore the Soviet Union, of with Estonia was once a part of. Finland is a bit different from Estonia as in comparison, Finland was never annexed although it was attempted back in the 1940s during the first soviet Finnish war. Finland has however shown concern for modern-day Russian hostilities (Wess Mitchell, PhD 2022). Finland is not at all distant from the fall of the USSR equation, however, as stock migrants came to Finland as it became a popular location to go to after the 1990s to emigrate but this was also largely comprised of Estonians. Much of this migration especially Russian groups came with high education and availability in work. This, however, highlights problems with integrating into Finnish society and so discussion on improving migrational policy arose to better accommodate for the rising number of immigrants which were largely resulting from economic factors (Ryazantsev & Gadzhimuradova 2021). As of 2020 Finland’s foreign population in 2020 was about 7.3% of the population notably mostly originating from the former USSR, Estonia and Finland. Finland largely draws in immigrants for the Family and Free movement. (OECD Library 2021)

Where demographic transition theory benefits but falters on these migrational changes, is that demographic transition focuses only on lifespan and fertility and doesn’t consider the forces that migration has on those population aspects. Due to the volume of people leaving Estonia, the country has aimed to address and develop the population count by encouraging more children per family via incentive, and also the country has taken to addressing scattering population density around the country's land space (Republic of Estonia Government n.d.). Finland on the other hand has benefited greatly and as more educated and ambitious migrants come into the country, it results in continued country development. Although given the population, migrants are largely coming from countries of similar statuses, it is unlikely any severely disadvantaged migrants are coming into Finland with ease.

Population Futures

On the graph there can be seen the following features:

• The overall fertility rate worldwide has decreased and is projected to continue decreasing until it flattens out and stabilises.
• More developed regions in 1950 tend to have lower fertility rates than less developed countries
• Finland and Estonia follow the most developed countries' data line more closely than other major data points.
• Generally, all fertility data points lie just below or slightly above a fertility rate of 2 children per woman. These rates favour less developed countries even at the projections.
As it stands, Estonia and Finland stand out as more developed regions of the world and follow similar fertility rate patterns like the average. Projections of their fertility rates indicate the stabilisation of fertility rate in the countries which is a real possibility as they begin to transition into late-stage demographical patterns of low death rates, low birth rates, and less need for children. Prior to projections this majorly contrasts with other regions of the world but at the projection level, it seems the world mostly begins to stabilise around the same fertility rate.

On Estonia’s graph of population projections, the following features can be seen:

• Estonia's population having initially climbed in population from 1950 to 1990 had seen a massive decrease after the 1990s following the fall of the soviet union. This decrease according to the projection herald a continued decrease in population after a very small rise in 2020.
• After a speak in population as high as 1.5 million and more, projection all, Estonia will net population as about as low as 800,000 by 2100.

On Finland’s graph of population projections, the following features can be seen:

• The population of Finland in 1950 was about 4 million peaking on the projections around 2030. Thereafter, however, it is predicted that Finland will slowly although steadily fall in population over the years.

Compared to Estonia, Finland's future according to the projections is a lot more steady and population numbers are more flattened as opposed to Estonia's projected decreases in population. With respect to the previous sections however, the projections of Finland aren’t that unlikely, as their fertility on figure 6 has been dropped and contraception is in prevalent use. Estonia is still yet to fully implement and integrate policy and planning to build up population so the projection of Estonia rapidly falling in population may be a little exaggeratory.

The Futures

With particular interest in Estonia’s situation, there is a lot to consider regarding decreasing populations. There has been the idea of “shrinking smartly” in demography of Estonia by identifying the growth of urbanised sectors and the decreases in population across rural locations. A outcome of recognises this problem is the split in densely populated locations and non-dense populated areas each differing vastly in maintenance costs and over time abandonment and vacancy of Estonia’s towns (Shrinking Smartly in Estonia 2022). One thing to ask is what direction in policy and action should Estonia potentially take to make this problem sustainable. Some of the actions Estonia has been taking is trying to increase their population by increasing birth rate by enacting policy that better helps sustain and effectively allow more room for families to become larger at a reduced expense (Republic of Estonia Social Insurance Board n.d.). As is stands this may have had some effect over the last decade in the fertility rate although long-term its effectiveness is yet to be seen. Ultimate the fertility rate needs to change to beat or match the population replacement rate of 2.1 children per women. The reason why this is so important is because their labour force decreases as population decreases and more of their population fall into the elderly age bracket as seen on the population pyramid graph. Although there is still a requirement for more long-term effective policy to improve the population (Republic of Estonia Government n.d.).

Of the Nordic countries, as fertility rates decrease Finland provides a platform by which this can be better understood. Mothers and women in general are encouraged and supported in childbearing just as much as they’re offered opportunity in Finlands labour force. Generally the aim purported is two children per women or more. Interestingly too, it was found that of opportunistic women in Finland, a highly progressive and developed country of gender equality, these equalities of gender had no bearing on the fertility of these women but rather, the family involvement as women largely are responsible for childrearing in families. In addition, a common sentiment found in studies in that people of Finland often desire to remain childless. (Hellstrand, Nisén & Myrskylä 2020)

In respect to the concerns of war especially with the Ukrainian war of 2022. Estonia’s concerns have largely been quelled as most Estonian consider their country “safe” (Republic of Estonia Government n.d.). This is potentially because of their integration with the North Atlantic Treat Organization (NATO) which has acted to protect and secure countries when the risk and action of war is put upon that country (NATO 2018). In contrast however, Finland hasn’t joined NATO but with recent tensions considerations on joining the organization has been brought up in retaliation to the Ukraine war alongside its neighbouring country sweden which will ultimately act to align the countries including Estonia together to support each other in generally the concerns of war (Wess Mitchell, Ph.D. 2022). Considering Estonia and Finlands previous history with the USSR, it wouldn’t be unreasonable if 2022 conflicts had an impact on migration especially with the possibility of Ukrainian refugees.

Conclusion

To summarise, it appears that Finland and Estonia are potentially going to follow similar demographical trends to one another over the next few years. Notably migration has been a massive population factor in Estonia having many emigrate following the fall of the USSR, and Finland comparatively has been in fact growing and continued developing a stable country. Comparatively, the two countries follow similar trends in the increases in life expectancy and fertility, but as the countries move forward, the aim for Estonia is to increase fertility by encouraging potential families whereas Finland are Moreso looking towards stabilizing their population numbers. AFAF. Expectingly, Estonia should be steadily increasing provided new family policies in place are effective while Finland over the next few years are likely to flatten out but see more and more migration into their country as the country continues to draw attention and praise in their quality of life.

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This research essay was written for the University of Otago in the paper HIST215 with an expected word count 1800 plus or minus 10% (1911 total). A total of 17 references were used with 26 footnotes

In the Middle Ages surrounding and during the 12th century, Catholicism dominated the theological religious majority with many sub-religious communities forming from it. Subreligious communities often had slightly deviating beliefs referred to as heretical meaning difference in religious interpretation and belief. Some of these heretical beliefs incited concern by Pope Innocent III as they profoundly undermined Catholicism and incurred immediate action. To the state, heresy was a treasonous act, in which religion and societal and state loyalty were hand in hand. So were heresy not subservient or deemed ideologically evil in the perspectives of the divine authority, it was an act of betrayal[1]. By the year 1209 in retaliation to rampant heresy, the Albigensian Crusade was summoned as a means to rid regions of France of heresy to recapture the land from the infidels whose ideological pestilence thrived due to a concerning tolerance. The Crusade was a hostile takeover with the statement “Kill them. God knows who are his”, for heretics were not easy to identify[2].
While successful in taking over land, the Crusades were unsuccessful in eliminating heresies as some regions of France continued to tolerate them, or merely had them run out as to exterminate heresy outright would be less feasible[3]. Thus, at the height of religious fervour and reclamation of the lands, the catholic church found reason enough to institutionalize its means of protecting the holy spirit. Dissenting forces in the form of heretics most notably the Cathars among others caused concern by disingenuousness and disobedience to the authority of the catholic church and scandalous practices and beliefs.[4] Part of this mission involved the appointment of an inquisitorial authority bestowed unique doctrinal power to judge and punish heretics who believed in variant interpretations of the catholic theology or entirely different beliefs that generally opposed the clergy or blemished good society. [5] The time of inquisition dissolved the Languedoc region of France of Cathar heresy, with the remaining being suspects runaways who were eventually eradicated either by recantation or immolation after capture by the catholic conquest[6].
It was Pope Gregory IX who elected two sub-religious catholic regiments called the Dominicans and Franciscans as well as bishops to track down heretics through tribunal, trial and investigation with permittance afforded by Pope Innocent III in the early 1200s.[7] Across different regions of Europe the appointed authority of ideological justice called inquisitors came into the thoroughfare and would relentlessly hunt and systematically destabilize belief in non-Catholic religions.[8] Although the spontaneity of the early beginnings of the Inquisition were a practice of experimentation. Documentation provided by early testimonial recording, and historical outlines and correspondence between literate members of clergy provide insight into the development, success, and operations of the inquisition of the time.[9]

The Inquisition’s Target: Heretics of the Languedoc

The Cathars garnered notoriety in the 1200s as an ideological and religious opposition to Roman Catholic belief of the time. This is largely attributed to different interpretations of the events of the bible, as Cathars are to a degree Christian, but believe in a theological dualistic system of both the material evil god, and the spiritual good god among other contradictory understandings of biblical events. 10 Waldensians, who were also a heretical target of the inquisition were similar to Cathars in their asceticism but were significantly more similar to the catholic church than the Cathars. Waldensians attained their infamy in the eyes of the Catholic public in their advocacy for pacifism as they opposed the penalty of death that Catholic doctrine tolerated. Their infamy only strengthened with continued disobedience and in later years resistance to authority in the form of “defense against violence”. [11] Concerning the events of the former Languedoc region France, due to a lack of intervention and domination from the Roman Catholics, the region became independent of itself with a church presence. For the Cathars and other heretics, this resulted in a city both functional and ideologically concerning for the Roman Catholics prompting action by them. By the time the Inquisition arrived the theological diversity of Jewish, Muslim, and Cathar proved too much to levy on its own as the incentive to challenge heresy in the region by locals wasn’t present. It was a successful and functional community with privileges given to especially women in and it had a healthy trade system [12].
The conquest of the Inquisition managed to eliminate the Cathar heresy from the Languedoc region. One might suspect that due to the pacifistic nature of the Cathar faith, which while threatened at the stake to be purged in fires, did not put up a defensible organisational system and fight against the Catholic church which suggested ruthless efforts of slaughter like the Albigensian Crusade prior was less necessary. The Inquisition thus was more of a localized police force and the heretics were passive common folk who were deeply entrenched in society and couldn’t just be destroyed through a force like the Albigensian crusade.[13]

Operations of the Inquisition in the Languedoc

Heresy to the Inquisition is assertedly open to the permissibility of mercy upon them. To be pitied by authorities for acts against doctrine could be done by penance or by hospitality and communication to the heretical individual was constitutionally charitable. The problem was in defining that heresy in a way that is accurate to detaining heretics. The Inquisition thereby focused on establishing their presence and focused on both “terror and denunciation” without standard criminal proceedings for the heretics.[14] Importantly, however, part of the goal of the Inquisition wasn’t to understand heresy. This is because the bishops and betters “Didn’t want to understand the impulse to dissent except as perversity.” The goal was only to be able to identify heresy such as the role of the inquisition and acquiesce a confession.[15] The inquisitor’s job itself did not come without its incentives, because as early into the Roman Inquisition to take over the Languedoc region where the Albigensian Crusade failed, suspected heretics for instance Cathars would be extirpated in accordance to legislation pushed by Gregory X with some recipient authority rewarding capturers for their work.[16] Although the methodology by which inquisitors managed their suspects was complex. They had to adequately prove the heresy of an individual which required a confession with the ideal end goal of conversion. Torture was to some extent practiced to force confessions, but according to the Glossa it “acknowledges the legitimacy of forcing converts to preserve the Christian faith but doesn’t do so to the torturing of potential heretics for confession.”.[17] Nonetheless, while rare, torture was used, but methods of punishment were more in line with the Inquisition's ability.
The efforts of the Inquisition in the Languedoc began with an announcement of their presence, with a grace period attached that promised lighter sentences and forgiveness by the inquisitional authority to confess. Those who would not confess in this grace period then had to be discovered by accusation, investigation, and suspicion. Part of this involved an extensive record keeping process, but the Inquisition relied heavily on sowing restlessness in heretic communities by manipulation of bonds and security.[18] The Medieval Inquisition used the imprisonment of heretics as a means of interrogation among other offences. The conditions of this imprisonment and the charisma of their wardens were motivators to extract confessions from heretics, the prison was a manipulation playground, and it was more of a trial of willpower for a suspected heretic. Methods such as reducing food, isolation, and long imprisonment sentences proved to have some effectiveness in getting a suspected heretic to confess. Complementing the harsh conditions however, we’re the threats by authorities of death, as well as the claim of penance and futility based on testimony of peers and inquisitorial plants that spied on heretics.[19] Coercion and deal-making played a role in manipulation too, with heretics being made offers in exchange for information on associated heretics, and schemes to tailor narratives against them to further pressure suspects.[20]
At its most extreme beyond the means of drawing confession, imposed by Pope Gregory IX, what was called the second crusade came into action. The inquisition came to power, and the refusal to recant and defiance against the inquisition’s vigour and the church authority saw threats of burning heretics at the stake, which was a disastrous threat as the Cathar faith believed resurrection had the prerequisite of burial, but it was to according to catholic doctrine to erase any evil sins in flame.[21] In contrast, those who did recant after their heresy had been confirmed were not burned, but subjected to a regimen of humiliation in the form of robes that identified them as former heretics. These robes were ordered to be worn by request of the Roman Catholic Church as a mechanism of penance thus becoming the Yellow Cross of the Cathars which asserted them into a lesser state of social existence. In addition to their identification, penitents followed a strict regimen to attend parish and bring rods by which to be beaten by priests. Their misgivings were tolerated much less, and they became generationally disadvantaged often not actually serving their penance to completion. Thus, in this case, an inquisitor's work would have been considered a successful conversion of an apostate, and or heretic.[22]

Record Taking in the Inquisition Process

The Inquisition had a very sophisticated methodology of recording data of their suspects as inquisitors and bishops had sufficient literacy. Much to the benefit of their process, records highlight their usefulness in testimony and authenticity of statements of suspects for witness statements and tests of consistent truth. Anyone under suspicion could’ve had an inquisitor who would question an individual’s activities, whereabouts, and relationships only to be tested against those statements later to find guilt in contradiction of testimony. While the authoritative legitimacy of justice cannot be confirmed other than individual accounts due to the manipulative nature of some inquisitorial processes, these records provide a framework for what inquisitors used in their judicial system as a means to justifiably convict a suspected heretic by an attempt at an evidence-based deduction reasoning system.[23] The capacity for literacy and notetaking led to a means for the Roman Inquisition to instate further control. Persecution systems moved in the direction of formal tribunals and extruded influence into neighbouring civilizations to establish the state. The influence of these authority structures only reinforced as new challenges heresy adjacent in the form of literature of heretical natures came to be prohibited and censored in favour of catholic doctrine.[24]
On the practical level, the documentation of heresy and procedure gave the church be ability to systematically assess suspects on a categorical level. But false allegations would only improperly pass for inquisitorial bodies and there wasn’t a way that could be justifiably used to ascertain a confession of heresy from an unknown suspect.[25] Records did not have to be limited to just statements though, as they could also be used to link and account for individual’s heritance and ancestry. Such records could then be used to make summons of individual suspects to follow up on their recordings which gave the role of record keeping crucial to the operations of the inquisition and its success.[26]

Closing

With the rise of heresy and unsuccessful attempts of heretic purging, the medieval inquisition was undoubtedly a fierce force of reckoning for the church that effectively purged the majority heresies of ideological concern within centuries of their deployment. It was through the use of new techniques, social manipulation, and the introduction of a new modern bureaucracy that destabilized heretic communities such as the Cathars. Thus, the catholic church could reassert dominance of their ideology in the formerly waning region of the Languedoc and more.

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[3] Marvin, L.W. (2013). The Albigensian Crusade in Anglo-American Historiography, 1888- 2013. History Compass, 11(12), pp.1126–1138. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12122. [4] Wakefield, L, W & Evans, AP 1991, Hereies of the High Middle Ages, Columbia University Press, pp. 220–241.
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